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Topic: virus: A memeticist's hack for religion (Read 485 times) |
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deadletter-j
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virus: A memeticist's hack for religion
« on: 2005-02-09 15:53:44 » |
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I'm in an interesting place.
Before I knew about 'semiotics', or 'memes' (beyond livejournal, burner crap, etc), I was studying how people learn. How they come to understanding. I teach mathematics. In a huge flash, which has only begun to recede, I understood how information came to construct in the students heads.
I started looking for language to express it, and came around to understand that I was probably talking about semiotics. After a few more weeks of work, I discovered that I was talking about memetics.
I showed up online looking for the people doing viable memetics experiments, open-source, public contribution, and discovered that, as yet, we don't have a language for that.
Similar to Blunderov's statement - it is hard to imagine that memes would _not_ grow to encompass [religion].
I have a completely articulated framework that deconstructs religion in a flash and reconstructs it as memetic reinforcement. To have such a construct not only strips religion of its teeth, it makes it fascinating to study - a meme that is not aware of itself as a meme.
Two mondays ago, I hacked three Jehovah's Witnesses. I asked questions that led us so far into their root structure beliefs that they came into contact with fundamental flaws in their belief structure. How do I know that such a thing occurred?
There's a pattern that occurs when a new idea is recognized - the person has a visible reaction to the 'aha' moment.
In the case of the Jehovah's witness, it was when the friendly smile suddenly left one face, replaced by an intensely worried expression, and a "wait... what?!?"
More on that some other time soon.
Here is the construct.
Humans are vulnerable to truth. By this I mean a very specific thing - we read others for _consistency_. This is how human lie detectors worked in the Chinese Empire - they would read a person for the consistency between words and body language, etc. Prime memetic hardware.
So along comes some person who sees a particular aspect/version/vision of society, and they speak that truth aloud. Then they speak to it in the language of action.
When actions and intent flow together, humans seem remarkably vulnerable. I intend to infect the entire CoV with specific scientific language for ideating, planning, reporting on and contemplating collective memetic insertions. At all times I will try to keep my intent right on the surface - to get us using a common language for all attempts to push memes on the planet.
Specific Examples: Jesus as memeticist. Jesus sees a particular crack in society. He was speaking to a root hypocrisy, such as the one we are seeing right now. He spoke to that, and his message reverberated among the people he was talking to, because he was echoing their language back to them.
He was also transmogrifying the original message of Abram's actions against the idols, the Torah in general - lensing it through to a new generation.
Now, the message spreads out into the population. The people hear it, and he backs up his message with action.
The people who follow him are so hard to root out that Saul has a moment, much like mine, I imagine, the 'aha' moment, the moment where we notice ourselves change, the meta, and he does it again.
He transmogrifies the message. He does it differently, to a new population. He also speaks the message with his actions, renouncing his old life, traveling and missioning.
Fast forward through time. The message goes out, gets lensed into new version. The original message is now subsumed into the larger messages of two churches - Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Not to mention other versions, neh?
Okay, Martin Luther. He studies the original message, compares it to the version he's seeing. The hypocrisy confuses him, so he pushes for clarity of the message. The corruption of the message turns out to be the corruption of the system itself.
So he goes home and _translates_ the message.
The Jehovah's witnesses the other day - they understood what I meant about memes when we talked about how the founders recoalesced the message into a new, pure, form, and begin spreading that idea.
It's the exact same as genes. Take a tribal gene pool. Four generations along, someone comes along who is the spitting image of old great grandma. Or has visions just like him, etc.
Systems cascade towards synthesis.
If the system comes into contact with larger systems/new information, this pattern is delayed.
One way to look at it is using the acoustical metaphor. As long as the meme can keep spreading with no boundary, it grows unnoticed, like morning glory. When it hits a wall, it bounces back, out of the ground, into the visible.
Now Martin Luther recoalesces as Martin Luther King. MLK recoalesces as us. There is a strategy for memetics to take over all the religions in the world. The ultimate open source illuminati!
How does this all apply to the CoV and a global memetics movement?
First, let me say that the narrowing of language to pure text makes explaining this concept very difficult.
Generally, the strategy is to get a person to notice themselves, because that begins the information cascade. The trick is to do it without getting them to blame it on the memeticist - any discomfort is transmuted through to 'our fault'
There is a system to it.
More coming.
-b
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Hijacking everything ever knew about anything.
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simul
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I am a lama.
 
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Re: virus: A memeticist's hack for religion
« Reply #1 on: 2005-02-12 15:39:27 » |
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> Generally, the strategy is to get
> a person to notice themselves,
> because that begins the
> information cascade. The trick is
> to do it without getting them to
> blame it on the memeticist - any
> discomfort is transmuted
> through to 'our fault'
I agree with this, although I admit that much of what you write is far too hip and leapthinking for me to connect.
But there cannot be a fixed “system” for this, can there?
What, exactly is your system?
IMHO, the current sweep enmanates from mass exposure to computation and gradual awareness of ourselves as information processing machines. This is similar to the sweeping exposure to the evolution meme.
The first hit was that we were apes. Now we are even baser ... we're machines.
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First, read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", and then read http://electionmethods.org.
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