2015-06-02

模倣子 Memetics, Genocide, Cycles of Abuse, Psychology and Notation

Great talk this week-end!  I felt like I had a number of breakthroughs on some memetic theory I've been working on for a while, a number of holes may be starting to get filled in.
I felt an urge to re-watch the film above (The Perverts' Guide to Cinema) when I got home which I did.  The title is misleading -- it's about ideology and a famous philosophy professor uses illustrations from various films around the world to illustrate the relationship between people an ideology.  My take is that memetics does the same thing, but with more rigor and specificity than the (excellent) dialect that this professor guy was laying down.

Anyway, it's on NetFlix if you're interested.


PS: one breakthrough I had since our chat and re-watching the movie was the relationship between those "resonation points" (those exclamation points in little boxes that are stimulated by memes generated by others -- I need to decide on a name and a symbol for these), the conscious mind, the double-wired "monkey see, monkey do" brain, idiometic systems (touched on in my comics -- "interpersonal" memetic systems might also be a good name), "regular" or interpersonal memetic systems, and group identification.  These all tie, together, into a consistent theoretical system which models and explains a lot of things that I have been puzzling over.  It's nice when a bunch of messy stuff is discovered to in fact perhaps be interrelated and a simple consistent theory emerges to tie them all together.



Music as the purest and highest form of meme -- pure imitation without reference to the corporeal. A song is also a MIAO or close to it, so can anchor memes and memories very economically.  

Ideomemetic systems and intergenerational oppression. The brain delights in witnessing the imitation of something familiar, of a familiar meme that it already knows. This is the biological basis which drives the brain to acquire memes, to participate in memetic interactions. Our own brain pathways are stimulated by witnessing a meme, because the monkey see, monkey do pathways resonate both by watching and by performing. 

So we need at new object: the resonation point. This is a part of the brain which is stimulated by witnessing a meme (or be performing it) and which can result in the activation of a memetic state, which makes one more receptive to the reception and production of new sets of memes, ie, new memes and resonances become available, and this is the memetic basis for group identification. Special Groups are where a higher number of one's resonances are stimulated AND where more of one's generated memes resonate in others. And more and more meme and resonance-rich memetic states are activated. This is the memetic explanation for fanaticism. One alienated a large part of the world in order to achieve a higher level of memetic interaction, of stimulation, from a smaller number of others. 

Monkey see, monkey do and memetic resonators provide a similar explanation for intergenerational abuse and oppression among individuals, families, and peoples. Abuser and abused create memes and resonators in the course of practicing the abuse. It is a meme in which only one side is actively performing the act of imitation (although the "victim" also enacts memes in the abuse scenario), but both acquire the memes and the resonances (recognizers? Eyeball with or without exclamation mark -- mark indicates activation or closed eye represents non-activation?) and so there is a rich memetic state which is similar between both abuser and abused, ie, the same memes and recognizers, so effectively either one can assume either role, so we see the abused becoming the abuser later and passing on the memetic sub-system of abuse to the next generation. We wonder why the Isarelis seem to treat the Palestinians the same as the Nazis treated them, wonder at why they don't see this is wrong, and perhaps this offers an explanation. 

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