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A key insight for me has been to understand ideology—religion, philosophy, and politics—in terms of biological metaphors. When I say “memetics,” this is what I mean. Ideas are an emergent layer on top of humans, related the way that biology is related to chemistry
No analogy is perfect and we risk confusion if we extend the metaphor too far. E.g., biological entities do not form symbiotic relationships with chemicals, but humans do something approaching symbiosis with ideas
On the other hand, concepts like mimetic desire are quite like chemical reactions from the meme’s perspective https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1049650017508646912
Indeed, Girard’s understanding of desire and sacrifice may be the best model we have for imagining a memeplex as a sociological auto-catalytic loop https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1054376830839345153
A memeplex is as real as any physical object. Consider a knife blade, which is made of atoms. In order to be sharp, the atoms must be arranged in a particular way. No atom is sharp,
But the knife is. Sharpness is as real as the atoms, but it is “virtual” https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330699672408065
But the knife is. Sharpness is as real as the atoms, but it is “virtual” https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330699672408065
Sharpness is a property, and it entails a capacity to cut. Cutting is an event, which comes in a pair with “being cut,” i.e., another object must have the complementary capacity.
Even if it never happens, the knife has the capacity to cut, and the capacity is as real as the property of sharpness, which is as real as the object “knife”, which is as real as it’s atoms.
If two objects have complementary capacities, they may together exhibit a tendency, which is the likelihood that capacities will be realized in the form of an event. But all of these things “exist” even if the event in question never “happens”
A philosopher’s ontological commitment should be to the objective existence of this structure and not to the possibilities themselves, the structure of the space of possibilities comprised by an entity’s tendencies and capacities.
Intelligence, in the abstract, is the ability to navigate possibility space, pursuant to a specific goal
But where does a goal originate?
But where does a goal originate?
An autocatalytic loop is also an autotelic loop. In the words of Douglas Adams, anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen, happens again. Self-justification is the only possible fount of purpose and meaning https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1032660400192479232
At the most atomic layer, all goals, all striving, all desires spring from auto-catalysis. As a necessary criteria for all other desiring, the imperative to persist forms behavior gradients and complex new desires emerge
The consequence of this is that old rationalist chestnut, organisms are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers, and desires that incidentally contribute to auto-catalysis can become irrevocable features of the mental landscape; psychology as geology
We are teleological beings: we understand everything in terms of telos, can’t not do it, it’s baked in, it’s the paredolia of ontology, it cannot be exorcised. This kind of thinking is perhaps tasteless, but it is also inevitable https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1042165631099916288
A parasite feeds off of a host, but sometimes over generations, a parasite can learn to use its intimate knowledge (map of possibility space) of its host for the benefit of both. The mechanism by which a parasite becomes a symbiote is simultaneous replication
When the replication of the parasite becomes inextricable from the replication of the host, the parasite has to pay rent.
To see this in action in the domain of memes, consider Shakerism. This noxious sect of Quakerism added celibacy to their practice. The meme could spread but it retarded human reproduction, so it destroyed its host population
Better versions of Christianity emphasized fecundity and fostered norms of industriousness. Religion that develops man upwards will not stop with man.
There is maybe no clearer indicator that a memeplex is parasitic and hostile than antifecundity, as for example in the feminism of Donna Haraway, who advises us to make friends instead of babies
Indeed the slogan “make kith not kin” whether it finds us through shakerism, feminism, or any other queer ideology, if taken to its logical conclusion, would end humanity in one generation
Pine tree crew holla. If you really want to save Gaia, chop off your dick, and everyone else’s. Anything that inhibits capital formation is your friend. Communists are the real ecofascists because their ideals are antithetical to prosperity and industry.
The best political compass has only one axis, it’s up to the technocapital singularity (and then the stars!) or else down into dust and minerals.
On the down vector, green politics, equality, redistribution of wealth, human rights, queer theory, communism, humanism, universalism
On the up vector, singularity, capital, arms races, fragmentation, technology, nuclear families, localism, the stars
On the up vector, singularity, capital, arms races, fragmentation, technology, nuclear families, localism, the stars
If you would bind Man to the earth, then worship Man. There is no more perfectly humanist claim than the below: https://twitter.com/mfckr_/status/925198592318627840
If we can suppress our intelligence enough, then we can all go back to being hunter gatherers, romantically killing each other for mates and meat, until a cosmological or geological event sends us back to dust
If we can suppress our horror and our humanity enough, then we (well, some of us) can build a ramp to the stars, and like John the Baptist, prepare the way for something much greater than ourselves...
Recommended follow up: https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/1139272398497374209
