GENE <> MEME

Sounds true to me.
Too bad I couldn't stop the fall of Rome.

Dan~~ wrote:

Sounds true to me.
Too bad I couldn't stop the fall of Rome.

It's part of life's cycles - what is young if it survives becomes mature and strong, and then it inevitably declines and dies, infested by all sorts of viruses and parasites in the meantime.

That which cannot defend itself against parasites ought o perish, and let a new variant take its place.

You still sound darwinistic to me. Is that your answer to ideological decadence ?

Dan~~ wrote:

You still sound darwinistic to me. Is that your answer to ideological decadence ?

Do you have a better answer than what nature has evolved to deal with unwanted mutations?

My positions are not imposed, they beg for a challenge and a superior explanation and method.
Survival of the fittest, superior, understandings, subjective perceptions, etc.

If it's not darwinism what is it?
"Superior" looks like what to you?

Maybe it's just me, but, it sounds like evolution-theory.

And?

Call it whatever you like...what is your alternative?
I ascribe and describe nature and reality....you?

I think existence is that which is most likely to happen when things come together and get random.
What ever is most probable, exists, in nature.
In this way, nature favors probability over strength or weakness.
To me it is an alternative to the ideas of superiority, fitness, and biological success.

I refer and defer to an experienced world where all this can be verified and experienced, or falsified, you?

if your only alternative to the real is nothing, then you are a nihilist; if your alternative is some word based circularity that refers and defers to icons, idols, or to text, or to more words, then....you are a nihilist.

You want to nullify an existence you cannot accept nor adapt to...not negate, nut only in theory, in your mind.

Dan~~ wrote:

I think existence is that which is most likely to happen when things come together and get random.
What ever is most probable, exists, in nature.
In this way, nature favors probability over strength or weakness.
To me it is an alternative to the ideas of superiority, fitness, and biological success.

What an inefficient system.
But natural selection is that....primarily.
Life evolves to streamline the process via choice, via judgment.

You have issue with words like "power" and "strength" because you've been called weak and powerless.

Strength does not indict omnipotence. It indicates a comparison - a relationship.
One individual is strong in relation in comparison to another - there are different kinds of strength. Physical, being primal and primary, there there is mental, also called spiritual, psychological.
All the term "strong/weak" indicates is a comparison, a relationship, in relation to environment, to circumstances, to an objective or to an ideal.

Chaos - randomness - is part of it, but life, as it pertains to living organisms there is nothing random in behaviours. They do not reproduce b because of chance, blind luck, but despite of it.
Organism implies organization, i.e., ordering.

Genetic drift is part of evolution theory - like unexpected events, like the one that exterminated dinosaurs.
But natural selection is not random - females do not flip a coin to decide with who to mate. Chance plays a part, but it is all governed by intent and judgments and choices - even if it is subconscious.

Call it whatever you like...what is your alternative?
I ascribe and describe nature and reality....you?

Looks like you've customized your mind to deal
with the ideas in the three dimensions of the earth.

Something near, stable, predictable.

I'd say it's guess work.
Because of nature's commonly shared qualities,
humanity can understand stars, planets, moons,
even though they can't touch these things.

We take what we know, and apply it to other places where it would fit.

I've taken some key ideas via this guess work.
I think I have a soul.
I believe in aliens and higher life forms.

Those things are uncertain.
Moderns tend to say no to those things.
I think they are ancient truths that the wise passed down.

There's no simple answer for how a philosopher can view the world.
You've worked on your world views.
You built a castle.

I do believe in truth and untruth.
I try to be truthful in my beliefs.
There may be no alternative for you at this time.
Just guessing.

"All the term "strong/weak" indicates is a comparison, a relationship, in relation to environment, to circumstances, to an objective or to an ideal."

If that is all that it is, then that is fine by me.
I just don't want straw men running around claiming godly power.

Dan~~ wrote:

Call it whatever you like...what is your alternative?
I ascribe and describe nature and reality....you?

Looks like you've customized your mind to deal
with the ideas in the three dimensions of the earth.

So presumptuous....when you know nothing of my metaphysical views, which natural selection are a part of.

Dan~~ wrote:

Something near, stable, predictable.

No, chaos is part of my analysis...but you seem to need it to remain comfortable...explaining why things happened or did not happen to you.
chance, chaos, randomness, is part of it...but a bigger part can be found in your choices, your judgments, your understanding....and that of your ancestors.

Dan~~ wrote:

I'd say it's guess work.
Because of nature's commonly shared qualities,
humanity can understand stars, planets, moons,
even though they can't touch these things.

There are no absolutes, no certainties...only approximations, only superior and inferior judgements, and understanding and perceptions.

Dan~~ wrote:

We take what we know, and apply it to other places where it would fit.

Yes, data, i.e., knowledge....if understood.
You have to define words properly if clarity is what you seek; if it is comfort than remain unclear and obscure.
Understanding is not synonymous with knowledge.

Dan~~ wrote:

I've taken some key ideas via this guess work.
I think I have a soul.
I believe in aliens and higher life forms.

You think intuitively - feminine.....you feel like it's all random, governed by no underlying motive, or order, or, perhaps, divine order, some incomprehensible force.
A soul?
Ha!!
Again....failure to define words, without reference to anything experienced, is how you try to detach form reality, a reality you fear and despise.

Those things are uncertain.
Moderns tend to say no to those things.
I think they are ancient truths that the wise passed down.

Dan~~ wrote:

There's no simple answer for how a philosopher can view the world.
You've worked on your world views.
You built a castle.

Tear it down and build a better one, if you can.

Dan~~ wrote:

I do believe in truth and untruth.
I try to be truthful in my beliefs.
There may be no alternative for you at this time.
Just guessing.

I'm guessing that your entire life has been guesswork which you think is random.

Do others enjoy things because they were lucky?
If it comforts you to think so, then who am I to change your mind?

I am not here to coerce, but to convince, if I can. If not, then live your life as you have. Why would it matter to me?

The only thing that matters is that minds like yours votre and by voting they affect mine, in a world with no accessible frontiers.
I'll have to formulate a way of dealing with this predictable factor - which I have.

Dan~~ wrote:

"All the term "strong/weak" indicates is a comparison, a relationship, in relation to environment, to circumstances, to an objective or to an ideal."

If that is all that it is, then that is fine by me.
I just don't want straw men running around claiming godly power.

This is not ILP where there are a half-dozen self-delared "genius's" and time travelers, world creators, Nieatzchean wannabes, inheritors of greatness?
ILP is a sanitorium of insanity. It's fun to visit but it can make you crazy if you stay for too long. Insanity is contagious.

Don't know what you've heard but here we deal with probabilities, not absolutes, not certainties. We do not want to coerce and seduce, but convince, or remain indifferent if we fail to do so.
Superior/Inferior translates to probable in a sea of possibilities - space/time.
For all I care you can remain as you are....but it is you who came here looking for me. I figure there was a motive a need.
Higher, superior, probability does not imply parity of subjective views.
Do not mistake one absolute, or the absence of one absolute as proving the opposite.  

I cannot dismiss the existence of ghosts....place a low probability on their existence outside human brains....this does not mean I think they are probable, but only possible, given what I know and do not know.
I build convictions bottom<>up....from ignorance towards higher degrees of certainty, without ever attaining absolute certainty.
I can entertain any possibility without taking it seriously.

Memes, i.e., ideas/ideals, with no external reference, e.g.. one-god, unicorns, ghosts, are mental constructs that can only attain an externality via semiotics - they can only exist as ideas in the brain and be projected via language externally - words must act as connectors of mind with the physical otherwise they remain noetic, theoretical, vague, obscure hypotheticals.

" I'm guessing that your entire life has been guesswork which you think is random. "
Well, random is a perspective word.
But odds definitely exist.
I consider myself lucky so-far.
I could get hit by a car tomorrow and die,
even if i was a "strong" man and knew things about myself or the world.
The odds are low so i go outside and i do my thing.

Dan~~ wrote:

" I'm guessing that your entire life has been guesswork which you think is random. "
Well, random is a perspective word.
But odds definitely exist.
I consider myself lucky so-far.
I could get hit by a car tomorrow and die,
even if i was a "strong" man and knew things about myself or the world.
The odds are low so i go outside and i do my thing.

All is Energy - dynamic, interactive.
Some energies are patterned - ordered - and others are non-patterned - random - Order/chaos - with the timeline pointing towards increasing chaos and decreasing order.
Existence is thusly experienced; resistance, agon, against Flux.

Perceiving patterns in patterns is what understanding means.
What you do with this insight is a personal matter.
Some use it defensively, others offensively, others do nothing with it....until they are forced to.
Power means this.
Freedom is power.
Independence - freedom to, not freedom from. Never absolute; always to a degree.
Not power over other but power over self, relative to others.

Power that reaches, that wants, i.e., needs, desires, is self-cotnradictory.
So power is never absolute, but always partial in relation to another.
True power attracts unintentionally.
This is why Abraham's one-god is improbable - a self-contradiction.

Alright. I think I understand what you're saying. Seems true to me.

I called it "Animal Power", the freedom-to.
The power to exist and keep on existing despite hardship.
I consider this power as noble.

And other animals are also trying to continue existing....and life feeds on life, and manimals need other manimals as allies and often as proxies to hide behind and to engage reality via their mediation.
Many survival strategies manifesting varieties of ideologies, moral codes, ideals = memes.

Genes = produce biological species.
Memes = produce ideological, social species.

Men are now playing social roles - put on their public faces - caricatures, characters.
Underneath the cosmetics, garments, and the semiotics, lies the body, the personae.
Moderns have convinced themselves that the public caricature is the true self - product of socioeconomic cultural factors - of the mind, a mental construct, denying the body's honesty, its presence as appearance.
They deny sex, race, etc.....everything of the body everything genetically determined.
Some go the other extreme and deny self as a movement away from a universal self - self as illusory, as proxy of a universal mind - i.e., god.

Two sides of the bipolar nihilistic paradigm - if not absolutely god, then absolutely man; if not the will of god, then the will of man is omnipotent creative agency.
Man becomes his own god - man as idea/ideal, humanity.

Modern urban environments are populated by various social species, under institutionalized protection because they would go extinct if they were placed within natural environments.
Genetic variants have corresponding memetic variants.

Genes are organic algorithms storing memories; language, i.e., semiotics, is the memetic equivalent.

Nihilism wants to detach to liberate to "give salvation" to the mind's creativity, allowing it to invent supernatural, surreal, unreal, memetic species.
Natural order inhibits such creativity, options bound by the body's presence - limited by the tangible, the empirical, the experienced. They replace salvation with freedom, or liberty, implying a detachment form past - i.e., from nature as the sum of all past nurturing, from precedent.

Mind finding salvation from body/physical via logos - linguistically.

And now, because I have to take my son out - he's off school - I must bid you adieu....
KTS is not frequented by its loyal members. We've found a secluded area to share and discuss in peace - undisturbed by vermin and all sorts of crazies.
They are multiplying, as they always do when empires collapse - see ILP.
A crazy house, mirroring the American Empire's deteriorating environment.
What flourishes in such times?
Superstitions, Messiahs offering salvation, and power as they announce the end of the world, insanity....and decadence.
Because the end of an Empire is like an end of A world, not THE world.

Christianity rose as Rome declined.
What followed had little to do with Rome....Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire were caricatures pretending to be Rome - coveting Rome's Hellenic foundations.
Roman in name but not in spirit.

If you have questions post them...until then...

Ta, Ta,

As I've repeatedly noted about art, it is the externalization of man's understanding and reaction to this understanding of himself.
As I've noted about technology it is the projection outward, via a medium, of man's self-knolwedsge and self-understanding.
Both externalized, projected outward, using codes, i.e., words/symbols, that imitate genetic codes.

Therefore memes are the amalgamation of these artistic, technological externalizations, projections.
Each meme representing a people's relationship with the world and their knowledge and understanding of themselves relative to their world, viz., a particular environment, or particular events, because every meme emerges within a particular people and a particular environmental circumstances.

The quantity of the knowledge and the quality of the understanding determines the sophistication of the consequent meme.
These memetic projections outwards are what establish a culture, representing a history and a development of knowledge and understanding, i.e., a spirit of becoming.
Civilization is the final culmination of culture in the form of ritualized, regimented, institutionalized forms, i.e., traditions, cultivation and idealization of a culture's ideal man - each with their own world-view and lifestyles; each with their own moral and practical standards.
Rome was the civilization founded on Hellenic culture.
India is the civilization founded on Hindu culture.
The USA is the civilization founded on Judeo-Puritan culture.

Every culture can manifest one or more civilizations in the course of its life-cycle, each expressing the most current, i.e., modern, up-to-date, knowledge and understanding, of a people of themselves in relation to their environment, i.e., world, in the form, of convectional thinking, judging and behaving, choosing, i.e., habitual inter-acting.
Not all memes are created equal since they reflect imperfect organisms each with a distinctly different quantity of self-knowledge, i.e., data, and a different quality of understanding, i.e., perception of patterns in the data.

This is evident in the difference in sophistication between different civilizations and the cultures they were founded upon.

Just as genes can be combined and synthesized, or be unable to be synthesized because they are incompatible, so too are memes; just as genes that are incompatible can be with suppressive interventions be forced into compatibility, so too can incompatible memes, such as Judaism and Hellenism, be forced into relative compatibility with human suppressive interventions - autoimmune systems tricked or supressed to permit synthesis of incompatible genes/memes.
Christianity is the most successful synthesis of incompatible memes, and tis urban environments are full of individuals that are the product of technological interventions that permitted the synthesis of incompatible genes.
This forced compatibility is not without a price - like a horse ass synthesis produces an unfit unfertile product, e.g., mule, or may produce - depending no the degree of incompatibility - all kinds of mental and physical deformities.
The first form of suppression is that of a female filtering role....imposing a moral and social technological, i.e., cultural, standard, that inhibits her natural filtering agency.

Unfitness can manifest as infertility - an inability to self-replciate - or it may manifest as mental infertility, and an inability to perceive and creatively adapt to fluctuating environmental circumstances, i.e., impotence in understanding fluctuating environmental circumstances, producing a lack of accurately evaluating and judging, expressed through bad choices.
Now, there are circumstances where a mind can perceive the odds and still act contrary to them, but then the individual is not prone to complain or be surprised by the consequences he's already evaluated as probable, even if to a lesser degree.
A common method is to claim that, no matter the consequences, that it was all expected, but this can only fool others and not reality, because the individual will pay the price for such self-decpetive excuses.
A man that never accepts responsibility of the negative consequences of his actions/choices can never evade them in the future, he can only repeat them.

Genotype is based on a four code system:

internet wrote:

There are four types of bases in DNA. They are called:

* Adenine (A)
* Cytosine (C)
* Guanine (G)
* Thymine (T)

Memes are founded on the minds binary, two-code system:
1/0

Already we see a reduction to attain clarity, or to focus - effectiveness via efficiency.
Dualities simplify/generalize fluctuating interactivities to a form the brain can process, and store as memory. DNA is the product of such simplifications, converting environmental conditioning in the form of four code sequences.
The mind develops understanding from simpler good/bad, friend/foe, edible/inedible dualities...towards higher forms of complex combinations.
Binaries are patterns within which patterns can be perceived to develop understanding - this necessitates the evolution of distancing - detachments - where part of consciousness perceives itself from a htird-person perspectivism, i.e., self-cosnciuosness.

I've already explained how two different patterns that repel each other because they are in disharmony can come into a state of balanced - harmonious - coexistence, i.e., a unity established through the mitigating effects of a third - or more - energy pattern(s).
The same holds true for memetic binaries and their absolutist one/nil dichotomies - the building blocks of thought, of ideas - founded on cellular systolic/diastolic cycles, e.g., systole = one, moving towards void; diastole = nil moving towards fullness, i.e., exhale/inhale...the rhythm of spirit, esprit, psyche {ψυχη}.
From these absolutist binaries the mind can construct combinations of complexity where things are not as absolute but may be both or neither, or in an in-between state - a state of movement towards and away.

The body's four-code system, arranged into sequences and algorithms, are more complex but they lack the minds simplifying lucidity.
McGilchrist divides this methodology to the right/left hemispheres, each dominated by a different method of engaging the world:

Internet wrote:

McGilchrist sees the differences between the left and right halves of the brain as not so much about emotion vs. reason – but something far more daring and complex. That the left and right hemispheres of our brains have radically different world views, and the conflict between the two has impacted greatly on the world as we know it.

One side is more esoteric and the other more exoteric. The divisions are not exact - not absolute - but overlap each other, adding to the complexities.
We may use Male/Female to correspond to master/left-hemisphere, and emissary/right-hemisphere, or use Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian metaphor.

An a-typical desperate degenerate has convinced himself/herself that nature stops when man invented language and culture.
For some unspecified, mystical, magical, reason, man exits natural selection, and natural order, when he begins to manipulate language to create civilizations.
A sudden inexplicable "detachment", which I've explored and described, separating genes from memes and casting memes into a theoretical state of limbo - like a kite snapping its strings and floating upon unpredictable gusts of hot air.

I've explained, as thoroughly as I could, given the medium, why nihilism is a defensive reaction to emerging self-awarness - triggering an impulsive fight flight mechanism - and how it manipulates semiotics, i.e., language, words/symbols, to attempt to disconnect mind/body from reality - especially to escape the limitations and failings of the physical - so as to "liberate" mind from the corporeal, the tangible, the physical world - salvation - allowing it to remain safe and sounds in tis own private, subjective, alternate reality, where nothing external can ever shame or threaten it.
A description of mind separating from body, consciousness attempting to disengage, i.e., liberate itself from a restrictive imposing and indifferent natural order - in theory even if not in practice - only when and if a collective is present to protect the body from the consequences of such ideological subjective detachments.
The collective is decisive for this process to survive a world it dismisses as being partially or entirely subjective - depending on the degree of nihilism being applied and the degree of detachment being attempted.
Language becomes a tool for creating immersive collectives, within which an individual subjectivity can escape, like a single fish into a school, or a lamb into a sheep herd.

To put it in another context, the Desperate Degenerate, i.e., spiteful mutant, wants to liberate itself from all possible negative consequences of its Intellectual detachments, because it intuitively knows it may not survive this without some external benevolent mediator lending a hand. It needs a collective to stand in-between its subjectively detaching mind and an objective world that cannot be so easily dismissed.
Collectives are essential in such psychosis.
A realist has the opposite problem. To the degree that he knows and understands the objective world determines the probabilities of applying successfully his subjectivity, inviting undesirable and, for him, unnecessary followers and stragglers. His world view does not require a collective validation, because it is validated directly through its application in and by the world - to the degree that he knows and understands world and himself determines the degree of his success and failure.

To put it as concisely as possible...
Nihilism is an attempt to detach memes from genes, as if they emerge out of nothing and from nowhere; returning genes to their Abrahamic roots as memetic creations, i.e., god's or man-made constructs.
John 1:1
Not "first there was the act, firs there was life and then words/symbols emerge to facilitate survival," but "first there is logos and then acts, and then life emerges from linguistics, from divine semiotics."

Nihilistic inversion: not memes from genes, but genes from memes.
Not memes externalized linguistically, rooted in genetics, but genes externalized linguistically, rooted in memetics, i.e., in abstraction, ideology, idea/ideal.

All is subjective - or at least only what pertains to humans - means this all is of the mind.
Only man has a soul and can attain immortality via the divine, means only man can use language to manipulate himself and other men, and to externalize his understanding of himself and the world via art, and technologies.
All that pertains to men is ideological for an unspecified mysterious reason.
Because man can rename himself b est or god, or anything he so wills, he is creator-god.
A male can linguistically declare himself woman, or goat, or horse, or cat...and it is so, because he can say so - logos.  
Language was the power of Abraham's god, now it becomes the source of man's divine power.

Nihilism = Memetic purification, memetic "correction", liberation, via inversion.
Logos, once more, is returned its Christian mystical magical powers - antithesis, an intentional corruption of logos as the Greeks used the term.

4-code genetics is the foundation of life, as we know it on earth.
2-code memetics is the foundation of consciousness, as we know it on earth.

From simple binaries mind constantly adjusts, gradually shrinking the range of its potential error.
This is why consciousness is continuous validation of mental abstractions, and an never be absolute, i.e., omnipotent, omniscient.
All consciousness can do is improve its approximations, and then continuously re-validate them, within a fluctuating and expanding field of possibilities, we call space - and how we relate to this continuous expansion measured as time.

What does expansion mean?
Increasing possibilities and decreasing probabilities, i.e., decreasing matter/energy, tending towards uniformity.
Infinite space/time (absoluteness) would be infinite possibilities within which probabilities are meaningless since probability implies a restriction of possibilities, i.e., qualifications of quantifications.
How else can be conceptualize this expansion of space/time?
As fragmenting dimensions, i.e., spatial/temporal directions.

In order to survive in this dynamic environment organisms must evolve from binary thinking to quaternary thinking.
Do or Die.

Objectivity, or empathy, as I've defined it, is a first step.

-edit-
The issue here is that nature is frugal, and evolving such sophisticated processing organs would be so energy demanding that the organism would also have to evolve more efficient and sophisticated organs to process high energy nutrients, and store gigabits of data, and a nervous system to transmit such high volumes etc.
Imagine a brain like our own but squared.
The 4-code brain would not be a multiple of the 1/0 but something completely incomprehensible to us.
The 1/0 refers to four dimensional space/time as a positive and its negative. A 4-code mind would incorporate more dimensions: 8.
Dimensions being an expansion/multiplication of directions and of possibilities.

It's not that human brains work like computers, but that computers are based on man's knowledge and understanding of how the brain works - like all art and technologies they are projections of man's self-knowledge and self-udnerstanding.

The degree to which memes contradict and usurp genes determines the degree of nihilism, and this determines the degree of collateral effects, like material and genetic pollutants undermining and destabilizing natural environments.

Artificial environment = when an organisms effect on its natural environment - the environment it evolved and emerges within - reaches the point where these interventions affect the organism - in this case homo sapiens - more than the original, then we've crossed the ambiguous line form natural to artificial.
Artificial environments, like all artifices, are dependent on an intervening willful agency, and are founded on ideological principles - from genes to memes - consequently creating advantages but also disadvantageous collateral effects, which begin to accumulate and compound until the artifice collapses - implodes - under the weight of its own destabilizing interventions.

What is a meme?
Don't care how anyone else defined and applied it in his own world-view.
All words either are useful or useless.

This word refers to a collection of encoded memories, passed, like genes, from generation to generation, but unlike genes it has more than 4 codes, but may have 24, or less, or more.

What is a meme?
The sum total of human technologies, and art, externalizing man's knowledge and understanding of himself, and the world, and externalizing man's reactions to the discovery of himself, within the world.

What is a meme?
A collection of techniques and technologies, and art, with a central unifying ideal, i.e., a culture, expressed as civilization.

To understand what memes are you must understand what art and technologies/techniques are.
Both externalize human abstraction representing man's knowledge - data - and man's understanding - patterns within the data - externalized via a medium.
Memes externalize man's particular world-view, founded on his knowledge and understanding.
Technologies are art with a utility.
Most art is simply an expression of man's understanding of himself within the world, or his reactions, his emotions, anxieties, tastes, etc.
Technologies are that plus useful, because they externalize man's comprehensions via mediums, such as computers using metals and plastics and glass, to reconstruct how man understands his own brain; like telescopes or microscopes externalize, via the same materials, man's understanding of his own eye.

Language, semiotics, is an art-form externalizing man's mental abstractions, feelings, sensations, perceptions, etc. - i.e., noumena.
Noumena most often representing phenomena - interpretation of that which is present.

What are memes?
The projections of human consciousness outward, via a medium, such as atmosphere, light, stone, wood, etc.

What are memes?
Like genes they are experiences, converted to a form that can be stored and brought to consciousness, used to guide and direct judgments and choices.
Genes use 4 nucleotides arranged in genome code sequences - DNA - and memes use letters arranged into words, sentences - ideologies, ideas/ideals, concepts etc.

An organism is the expression of genome as phenomes; a culture is the expression of ideas/ideals as civilizations.