MEME's

As I promised by my last post, I will bring up the subject of memes. But only a short intro at the moment, for I plan to write a much larger and more in depth philosophical post on memes as soon as I finish a book that I'm reading and I have time to go back and brush up my thinking on books I've already read.

The Definition of a meme: " consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity"

"Hey Jude" is a meme. The Macarena dance is a meme. Christianity is a meme. A thetan is an imaginary soul to do with scientology, but is also a meme.

So you might ask..what's the big deal? Well Richard Dawkins revolutionary idea was that meme's are also subject to the laws of natural selection just like genes. Meme's do not desire to be replicated and passed on from human to human..no more than the common cold virus 'wants' to pass from person to person. But based on their fitness (their ability to spread aka replicate themselves in the minds of humans) they either continue to get passed on, or they die out.

"Hey Jude" still exists because people enjoy it a lot and still play it. A lot of memes exist because they are helpful to human beings (getting vaccination shots) would be one while others such as bloodletting die out because they are found out to be not helpful to humans.

So far so good. Good memes that help out humans last, while bad memes eventually die out...but its not so simple. Some memes are good at getting themselves replicated, but by their design are harmful to the human minds they infiltrate.

A perfect example of this is the Muslim meme of "if you suicide yourself for the muslim faith you will be awarded 72 virgins in heaven." This meme destroys the mind it gets passed on to, but it gets the person who killed themselves some recognition and on the news and more people find out about the "72 virgins in heaven" meme, which further spreads the meme.

These memes are called meme viruses.

Christianity is one such meme virus. It is so powerful that unlike other memes like "Hey Jude" it takes over the mind it infiltrates and gets the human to devote his or her life in service of the meme, getting the person to spend his life proselytezing and further trying to spread the meme.