Comment by komali2

13 days ago

Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.

10 comments

komali2

Reply
TeMPOraL  13 days ago

My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end:

<quote>

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

</quote>

--

[0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something.

[1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...

[2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.

  • adolph  13 days ago

    Vervaeke makes a claim of parasitism explicit in the Meaning Crisis series.

      We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it 
  takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to 
  lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This 
  capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using, 
  complexify, to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities, 
  has a downside to it.

  This is a complex, self-organising, adaptive system! If you try and intervene 
  here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted 
  intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you tried to destroy it. 
  Why? Because it's making use of the very machinery by which You adapt, and 
  make use of the things that are trying to destroy You!

    https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-13-awakening-from-the-meanin...

  • andrei_says_  13 days ago

    For more ideas - One can definitely see multigenerational patterns of abuse and trauma as self reproducing parasites.

  • naasking  12 days ago

    > Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

    I think this was kind of known for a long time, and pithily described in the well known phrase, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".

  • iterateoften  13 days ago

    Also the most successful parasites have defense mechanisms to protect it. The process of radicalization and cultural heritage in general is a type of defense to make sure the parasite survives.

shawn_w  13 days ago

See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.