knowledge,
terrain, organisms...
Memef*ck’d
The term meme has been coined to describe
in a sense the symbolic and meaning content of a symbol system functionally
empowered to replicate or modulate itself and/or other systems.
Foundational or ‘base’ memes do not ‘arise’
in cognitive beings, in general, they can only be communicated by
contact with another meme-bearer. There are many elemental meme-sets
or systems which when present in sufficient diversity in a host,
can generate secondary memes, which can then be communicated to
other hosts entire.
Complex or secondary memes can seem to ‘arise’
in individuals or populations, but this is actually more likely
an emergent property of complex memosystems in cognitives or societies,
rather than any real spontaneous generation.
Looking closely at memes is difficult in regular language,
since language itself is meme-like in its nature, and nature tries
to dissuade eyes from looking into the nature of eyes, with eyes
— perhaps to discourage the inward trance that could render
a being into lunch for a predator while drinking from a reflective
waterhole…but that’s mere guesswork. I would hesitate
to attempt to sharpen extant definitions here, except to say that
a meme is an idea, perspective or perceptual atom that has certain
capabilities when embodied in a suitable cognitive being. Some common
modern meme examples might be useful, so here are two secondary
(complex) but currently common memes:
1. That a forest can be converted into and abstraction
(such as dollars) with any reasonably beneficial outcome.
2. That known plants or animals other than humans
are not sufficiently cognitively complex to qualify as intelligent
sentients.
A meme encircles a boundary of perceptual inspection,
creating separation, and it tends convert obvious local variables
into succinct, and often erroneous, negations, assertions, values
and conclusions. It also establishes real and virtual networks amongst
its hosts, the sum of which we might call it’s mimetoscocium.
Is it deadly? It depends. It’s a powerful and
elemental feature of symbolic cognition, and probably in some way
of living cognition in any system. If the host is unable to escape
the meme’s power, the host serves the meme, to a greater or
lesser degree, in action. This means that, alike with our models
of ‘instinct’ in animals (which are generally absurd),
a human being can be seen in many if not all cases as something
like a walking meme-collector. Nearly all conscious activity is
‘piloted’ in the large by such systems, and such foundations
of systems in most people’s modern conscious experience.
In modern human socities, memes, and their effect
on both biospheric and human experience, is more than profound —
it may be the single most important active principle in living matter
on earth, since it may dictate the chances for the myriads of beings
which have and may arise here to have any chance of persisting.
For humans, dominant memosystems will in experience be, in many
cases, the single most malevolent and aggressive threat to personal
liberty, health, hope and happiness that can possibly arise in any
stable domain or culture. This is because the human activity which
creates scalar domains of elaborating threats against all peoples
and ecosystems is mimetically sourced, and elaborated around us.
Even without the terms or discrete understandings to name it to
ourselves or others, our living biologies are not only consistently
aware of this rapidly escalating threat — they are actually
suffering the attack, now, in realtime, and our bodies, and minds
are desperately attempting to awaken us as individuals and a species
to the severity of the situation. In every case, some popular momentum
is busy ‘diagnosing away’ the very signals which are
meant to offer us a clear picture of our situation in the biosphere,
and the human cogniscium which emerges therein. Instead, we silence
all such signals, personally, culturally, and ecologically. We ‘machine’
them into compliance with more ‘manageable’ (read: rapaciously
convertable/co-optable) paradigms of activity and ‘meaning.
I need a term here. A term for the symbol systems,
their meanings, and the human cognitive terrains they inhabit. For
the sake of brevity, I will refer to such things as thrisps: a potentially
discrete system of symbols and meanings, such as the thrisp of mathematics
or Christian philosophy. In examining the nature of thrisps, and
their activity in human populations, we find a virus-like predatory
quality to their behavior, as well as the real outcomes these thrisps
result in, when bonded with powerful, active, and often unsuspectiing
human hosts.
Unlike viruses, thrisps do not possess their own material vehicles
to grow, modulate, gain terrain, or effect reality. Thrisps are
energetic beings, and their bodies, in so much as they exist or
can be discussed or examined are energetic in nature. They use extant
cognitive beings as ground in which to replicate, modulate, invade
or disperse. They are conceptual organisms whose boundaries are
described by their native and dominated terrain and their activity.
Their body is the body of their action and activity within hosts,
and the action of activity of the hosts.
Are thrisps organisms? perhaps not — but viewing
them in terms of virus-like systems can be a useful lens.
A thrisp would include its meme, but encompass the
entirety of the system of symbols, meanings and the topologies of
their terrains and subthrisp cultures. A thrisp is thus the ‘real
or potential body’ of an extant or possible meme. In human
persons, families, cultures, society and experience — we witness
a consistent battle between various thrisps; for terrain, dominance,
and reproductive rights. While our understandings od Darwin fail
in the common consciousness to be complete, the common understanding
of rapacious competition is far more true in the domain of mimetics
we are speaking of.
In each human being, or any symbolically cognitive being exposed
to languages which result in and support highly predatory thrisps
(there are many which do not) the battle is not likely to be much
smaller or less complex.
If I could take you with me, into a conversation with an insect
(which I assure is not only possible, but happens very frequently
on our world), and you could ‘listen’ with the insect
directly, you would first have to learn a concept we humans have
no word for. It means, essentially, ‘antiThrisp’. All
of their gestures and language are ‘antiThrisp’. If
you could translate such a conversation you’d discover most
creatures have the same term that we use for ‘machine’
for a ‘cognitive thing’ they consider to be ‘deadly’.
They won’t allow it in conversation. The listening modes of
a thrisp-colony (i.e. an adult human) do not allow for common animal
communication, though in our modern moment there are many analogues.
The creatures see ‘machines’ and this cognitive ‘thing’
as ‘the same’. They abhor it. But ‘talking’
with an insect, is not at all the kind of thing a human being is
likely to model. It is like falling into conical scales of heroic
and emotional story-poems, in very brief bursts of dreamlike imagery.
Sometimes, it’s just getting bitten, or stung, too. Animal
communication is real, but it is not systematically expressible
with the sorts of approaches we commonly apply. And many of our
root metaphors about language and communication, in general, are
badly misfounded because they source themselves in separation-models,
which again, are absurd — at least at the animalian scales
of life.
Not all memes develop elaborate or pervasive thrisps; not all thrisps
gain elaborate or pervasive terrains, and many of the memes themselves,
which in systems form the meme-core of thrisps can be very short-lived.
A meme itself cannot do anything, it possesses no inherent active
principle (that I can identify), and perhaps cannot even be said
to exist outside a host. Once enhosted, however, memes link to form
systems and entrench or elaborate themselves much in the way organisms
do. Once this has occurred, we have a thrisp. This is a highly adept
mimetic predatory momentum in a cognitive medium. By mimetic, we
mean something specific: it utilizes mimicry and stealth-based strategies
in order to propigate, gain terrain, and secure survival privileges.
And, in the proper environment, it learns to do this geometrically
more adeptly in a series of ongoing scalar leaps.
The interactions of such intangible cognitive fields of activity,
or organisms, is perhaps better pursued in detail in academic texts,
but a general acquaintance with terms will serve us well. It’s
not my intention to re-invent what others have adeptly explored,
nor to verify their research, merely to create some terms with which
we can, as explorers, examine some peculiar terrains ourselves,
experientially. While it’s true this is merely a single model
amongst many possible models of symbolic cognition, this doesn’t
devalue the model, it’s actively verifyable, and is actually
robustly inclusive of other models in general.
In an active way, humans are, at our symbolically cognitive core,
gardens of memes and thrisps and their attendant identifiable terrains
and menageries of companion-structures. There is the sort of ‘animalian
person’ which forms a kind of ‘planet’ or medium
upon which these systems superficially thrive, as well.
These gardens are not isolated, but instead connected
to every possible sensing system we can or may possess, and also
to all the environments beyond the ‘membrane’ of our
individuality, however we may chose to define it. It seems likely
that all cognitive gardens are connected at the level of matter
itself, but that is a speculation for later unpacking. Our societies
and cultures represent, in a real sense, not human nature or hope
or even desire, but rather the relative or absolute displacement
of those ideals (our humanity) by the activities and goals of dominant
thrisps. It isn’t that humans have no power over these strange
cognitive symbionts, but rather that one cannot pilot a car that
you cannot even detect as encapsulating you. You will also likely
enjoy some potentially hilarious cognitive pratfalls attempting
to detect that you are within a car if the tools of detection comprise
the car itself. This is an essential problem of human cognition,
its potentials, and our own ability to affect them.
It is with and through these gardens, and in the company
of their many denizens and landscapes that we, moment to moment,
co-invent the reality we experience, value, judge and pursue goals
in. The systems of thrisps that are our window into these domains
within and without our ‘selves, at the same time constitute
in their shape a cage which proscribes the domain of our power,
perception and effect in all domains of our cognition and activity.
Alike in function with the protein shell of a cell, these systems
define potential outcomes by what they bond with or repulse, but
what they acknowledge, encourage, optimize, take resources from,
reject. They are, in a sense, what they eat. Actors in the myriads
of possible dances of cognitive signaling, reception and interpretation.
‘Infected’ as it were, by the dominant
‘memes’ or ‘virulent symbol/meaning organisms’
that we encounter in our birth-culture, language and living experience,
we find ourselves given, in a real experiential sense, ‘wings
which burn when we use them’. They are wings in that they
allow us to soar to theoretical abstractions that have real values;
mechanical, creative, survival-oriented, pragmatic. But in agreeing
to use them, we become bound by their rules, confusing them with
‘truth’, and often the consequences in action of such
confusion are quite profound. Is life a particle or a wave? Like
light, both and neither.
We call certain things by names which we presume to
have certain meanings but more often, our terms are too reductionist
to have any anchor in reason, and carry with them assumptions which
are entirely misleading as regards what they, in useage and ideation
purport to represent. Worse still most of us are taught ‘mimetic’
learning. We adopt tokens, and present them in sequences, rather
than gathering a mastery of sources and foundations from which our
personaly unique talents, noticings and skills can then respond
to real interactions.
When we apply reductionist ‘terms’ to
living systems, we make the assumption that we can survive the outcomes
of ideas that arise from reducing the majesty and mystery of living
matter to abstract symbols.
In the tools we use to examine these fields, or individuals
and groups, in the symbols we apply with our science, literature,
culture or activity — in the meaning in these symbols, lies
our ability to interact with any possible reality effectively. More
interestingly, the power in any society lies only in its symbols,
their meanings, and those who are culturally empowered to modify
or define in function the symbols and meanings they accrue in thought,
literature, media and activity. It’s all in the name, the
meanings, the implications and the action around it.
Living systems are not in reality mechanical or reducible to math
or value, — or any form of symbol — and where symbols
imply otherwise, such symbols actively function in direct opposition
to the goals and prosperity of living systems. This isn’t
the theory of a logician, a scientist, or a bureaucrat — it’s
the recorded and known experience of all human and animal cultures
of the last 400 years, to be modest in estimating the temporal scope
. As these systems are converted, the hope and survival of the surviving
beings is converted along with them, in a dramatic, and easily demonstrable
way. The active, organized and purposeful silencing of peoples,
ecosystems, species which began as rapaciously as it is ending,
has its genesis and form in terms. Symbols and meanings.
In the end, a mountain or tree is reduceable to inkspots on paper.
A coyote or the whole species of raptors reducible to bank accounts.
One moment there’s a bird. The next, just a number.
If we could momentarily set aside our obsession with seeing ‘atoms’
and individuals – we would as easily perceive ‘tides’
and fields of living energy and potential. Fields of related activity,
and fields of intention. Pulling back, we would see the dances of
interpenetration, the impossibility of separation amongst living
matter. We might discover that life itself is cognition, and that
we are no more above or below other life forms than a flower is
above or below the sun. We might discover as that the world is a
single being, in a real sense, not in the sense of mere terms, but
in the sense there is a single body with a single mind, a wholism
of cognition, expressed in the myriad living forms and their natures
and living activity. Discovering this, we would (and will, if we
survive) eventually awaken to the fact that our omnicides of culture
and ecology have been directed at our own family, and in many cases
species more advanced than our own in domains we’ve not yet
even imagined. Sentient species. A planet, filled with the ‘aliens’
of our modern myth, invisible, and prey for desperately rapacious
‘systems of knowing’.
Even seen as a dance of interacting ‘motes’
or individuals, what we perceive when we examine living beings and
systems turns out to depend upon the lenses of perspective we bring,
their angles and distances of fixation from their subjects —
as well as how we define the subjects themselves, their groups and
relations, how we value the ‘products’ of the activity
of individuals and systems of individuals. All of our perceptions
will be based on how we fundamentally define and value the symbols
we use to represent them. This turns out to be a bit more serious
a noticing than it might at first appear.
Living organisms are consistently active in forming, and carrying
out something’s intention, at least on a metabolic level,
and most likely in cognitive domains both common and as yet unrevealed
to us. This is going on all day long, and we can take humans and
our ideas and languages away, and it will still be there. This ‘thing
life does’ is something we emerge from, and our langauges
and stories and beliefs also emerge thus. Even matter is cognitive,
in the sense that it makes choices about activity based on local,
and, by proxy, distant environments. There is at least this basic
sort of cognition in matter. The more complex the matter, chemically,
and the more complex the environment, the more complex the cycles
of cognition involved become. Thus it is also in living cognitive
systems.
When two chemical or cognitive systems, or fields,
meet, or interact, a dance of singalling arises, inevetibly. In
the exchanges of energy that are the hallmark of such interactions,
their shapes, their arising, modulations, departures...all cognitive
activity can be said to be contained. At least, as long as we remain
general, and use terms like ‘energy’. The generalness
of the term is useful in maintaining some relationship with perceived
or theorized reality. It allows us to encompass almost any possible
(symbolically representable) realm of interaction.
