(idea) by Soulslayer Fri May 12 2000 at 20:32:53
A work in progress...

There is a tendency in modern thought to divide the forces of the universe into order and chaos, black and white, good and evil. And while many espouse upon the idea of order existing within chaos and the nature of such pattern less patterns I find that very few people allow themselves to truly think differently.

Perhaps it has something to do with our gregarious and herd-like nature. The need of many (most) humans to socialize and otherwise interact with members of their own species causes a smoothing of ideas and thoughts into a more unified group behaviour. Dissidents and individual thinkers cause violent disruptions in the collective beliefs of such groups. These disruptions can cause the social group mind to splinter and fragment into multiple near-fractal social groups. I say near-fractal because these shards of the original social group remain virtually the same with perhaps only one meme dissimilar to the original group mind.

In a small social group such aberant behaviour is quickly removed; either by physically excising the body that houses the meme or by reinforcing the original memes until the new meme is destroyed. Thus new memes have difficulty impressing themselves upon other minds. When a human group attains a large enough size, however, more unique memes can sustain themselves in the larger social collective. They must maintain just the right sized population to ensure survival. If a new meme is too large or attempts to imprint itself on too many older members of the collective group then the collective will notice the new meme and attempt to remove it for fear of losing its own cohesion and splintering into smaller and less successful groups. By some strange fate this act of noticing the new meme is frequently the cause of the very fracturing of the group mind that it dreads.

Some memes manage to never raise the attention of the collective and actually become merged with the collective altering its perceptions without allowing it to realize that its outlook has been influenced by an aberant meme.

The problem with collective minds and the human trait of social darwinism is that the human social group has the unique ability to destroy itself both through willful stagnation and in reflex panic.

Unfortunately the average individual human mind seems unable to internally think in a fractal manner that would more comfortably allow for the introduction of new memes. What is needed is for a meme to be introduced that stimulates abstract and branching thinking that will more readily accept a new idea and merge its structure into the collective consciousness, allowing such memes to propegate through out the collective structure.


It is this regard that I think Everything 2 may eventually play a part. That is, creating the perception of cohesion in chaos.


More to come...
del.icio.us Facebook Digg StumbleUpon Reddit (I like it!)
Y'know, if you log in, you can write something here, or contact authors directly on the site. Create a New User if you don't already have an account.