nanoscale spacecraft = particulate level t = 0 in them Dream of 16 years old Einstein in italy omnipresent Thats why they also already exist on this planet. The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore (Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.) Do memes exist independent of consciousness or is consciousness a prerequisite for meme production? Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes. - Dr. Susan Blackmore - To answer you more fluidly, is consciousness required? I dont think consciousness is required for anything. I think that question implies a certain kind of theory about consciousness. The relationship between consciousness and memes is very interesting. You see people unconsciously copy a whole lot of things. For example, you probably know that people who like each other, when theyre in conversation, they copy each others way of standing, facial expressions, and so on. Thats memetic. Theyre actually copying them. And people they dont like, they sort of stand back and they dont do that. Thats entirely unconscious but people also unconsciously copy gestures, all sorts of things. And those are memes, theyve been copied unconsciously. To some extent were not really conscious at all of most of the memes we copy. We chat and we pass things on without really thinking about it. What interests me is why do we have these false theories about consciousness and in particular, false theories about the self. You know, this idea that I am somehow inside my body running the show and that I have conscious experiences, Im sure this is false. One of the things that I did in The Meme Machine and have done subsequently in more detail is to ask the question why should we have such an illusion? It doesnt benefit the genes for us to have an illusion, I dont think. But it does benefit the memes because if we have this false idea of self and go around, I want this and I do that and I need that and so on, all of this encourages these memes. I believe in God - that helps the idea of God rather that me just saying God. I believe in God passes it on. It is to the memes benefit, to cluster around and make a huge memplex, this selfplex, and I think that the memes have caused us to get into this illusion of a self, an illusion of what consciousness is like - which were completely wrong about - so I blame the memes. What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?... A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds... If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldnt move. Thats because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:16:02 +0000