Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Conceptual Symbionts, Memes and Football

As you might have guessed by now - I hate the word 'memes' - it kicks up all sorts of images and associations with organicity that it shouldn't, so I came up with something better/less confusing/other. Ta-Da:

Conceptual symbionts.

My new and exciting bit of jargon. These little beasties are classified (a) by having no direct physical components, (b) by being a collection of ideas, or closer to the mark by being a sequence of ideas which both lead to and re-inforce eachother, and finally (c) once adopted, become indespensible on a global scale, at least for a period of time.

It must also be noticed that the initial idea in the sequence is one that is already implicit within whatever system it arises from.

I've searched around for a good illustration and come up with football. Not, alas, the American kind, because I don't know enough about it and lack the will to bother aquiring such knowledge, but the British kind. "Soccer". Blasphemy. :lol:

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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

No God Required - Religions Spread Anyway.

One of life's great mysteries to me was how social systems spread from one grouping to another, in particularly ones, like religion, which seem both to do harm as well as good.

In the following post I hope to show how I think it works.

To start off with, here's a poll I conducted a couple of months ago on a philosophy site.




Okaaaay, so not exactly a humongous sample but the best I can do... So - to sum up the results:

Religions have benefit, but also have negative effects.
The benefits are mainly applied within the religion's host society.
The negative effects mainly effect other societies, outside of the host society.

No real shocks there.

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Sunday, July 18, 2010

From Dope to Pope.

In the place where I was born, there is a magnificent cathedral, one of the most impressive in all of Europe. It's an amazing sight, hard to look at without feeling a sense of awe, and inside you step into the vast collective quiet of hundreds of hushed voices, even the most raucous of tourists cowed into the pretence of respect. The vicars and priests hover in their cassocks, with folded hands and ethereal smiles, just in case anyone has a question, physical or metaphysic.

Even the most hardened of atheists, or agnostics must admit, religion has come a long way.

I mean Jesus, if religion was always just a bunch of bullshit, how did it come to have all this cool stuff..? What happened in the big "SHAZAM!!!" Such a transformation is indeed miraculous, I mean, no other single institution of man throughout history can boast of such a plethora of architecture, riches, pomp and ritual.


One senses divine power.

Or does one..?

Any good detective works from a couple of very basic principles: One of which is the time honoured playground cliché of "Who started it..? and the second of which is "Follow the money". Which is what we will do.

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Friday, July 16, 2010

Vunerabilities to Conceptual Disease.

Just as our bodies are suceptable to the attacks of germs and viruses, and our computers prone to their cyberspace equivalents, so too are our minds and societies open to infection by conceptual diseases.

Vunerabilities.

1) Cause and Effectitus:

We are very suceptable to 'miracle syndrome' because of an ability unique to humans (and to a lesser degree, the higher animals) the ability to link events occurring within close spacial and/or temporal proximity to each other into webs of cause and effect. We see a flash, then hear a bang, and automatically link them into a sequence - if this, then that - tenuously at first, but more and more firmly with each repetition. Trouble is, because this system is largely subconscious (dopamine neurones) and therefore not reflexively 'rational' it is very prone to being conned. The system also has another glitch, it operates on a sliding scale - in which the number of observed repetitions can be substituted by size of payoff, especially if that payoff is unexpected.

ie: if percieved event X occurs followed closely by event Y, but doesn't actually have any particular direct effect (good or bad) on the perciever, then let's say it will take arbitrarily 50 such observences of the sequence for it to become 'learned'. This kind of situation describes 'background' events and leads to stuff like 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight.' Something useful pretty much only to the herders of sheep.

However, if event A occurs, followed closely by event B, but this time acompanied by direct payoff/detriment C, the learning curve, depending on the size of the effect involved, is cut down to fewer and fewer repetitions. Imagine something stupid, like a clown with a pair of cymbals. He clashes them together, and, undetected by you, his assistant zaps you with 1000 volts, right in the butt. How many times do you think it would take you to form an unconscious aversion to clowns armed with cymbals..?

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