virus: Re: How did we get here?

Hakeeb A. Nandalal (nanco@trinidad.net)
Mon, 10 Feb 1997 19:34:40 +0000


Peter Charlot wrote :-

> This is going to sound very weird, but it is the truth. I came up with the
> basic concepts underlying what you all call memetics (and what I will now
> learn to do) twenty years ago, when I was thirty. This, after spending ten
> years trying to develop a theory for machine consciousness. Last year I
> finally put it all down in a paper called, "Mind As Cosmos."

For years I tried to convince people that the spread of religion
was very similar to that of a disease moving across the land.

Eventually I read "The Selfish Gene" and recogized Dawkins' "meme"
to be what I had in mind.

About a year ago I was trying to explain to some people on the Pathfinder
boards that their religious convictions were "memes". I told them to
simply "look it up". They said they couldn't find it in the dictionary.
I then used a net search engine to get more on the subject. One of the
pages it spat out was "The Church of Virus".

It's my belief that a lot of people on this list thought up the "meme"
concept long before they came across the formal Dawkins definition.
It's also my belief that people gravitate towards ideas that they already
have i.e. their "meta-memes".

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Hakeeb A. Nandalal
nanco@trinidad.net
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