What are the pros and cons of living off-grid? By living off-grid, I don't just mean living off the electrical grid. I mean off-grid in the sense of having opinions completely non-mainstream, believing in unpopular religious perspectives, subscribing to alternative arts, speaking a different language, living away from large cities, taking non-traditional jobs, and dropping out of school.

Continue reading...

I didn't ask to be thinking about religion, or Christ, or morals, or attitudes, or philosophies, or democrats, or republicans, or left, or right. I didn't ask to have to make an opinion on gay marriage, to discuss Supreme Court decisions, to look at the land where I was born and connect it to the concept of nationhood.

I didn't ask to think in terms of careers, and marriages, IRAs and college tuitions. I didn't ask to have to testify on the nuances of Indie Rock or Progressive Rock, and to then care about it afterward.

Other forces have foisted all these concepts, or memes, into my head. I woke one day, and there was a dictionary full of issues that I was to then discuss with vigor, where my opinion or lack thereof, or my interest, or lack thereof, would cause me hope and fear, anxiety and optimism, and potentially forge or divide relationships with humans.

Where are the real humans and real emotions that aren't slaves to concepts? I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of memes that I did not ask to germinate in my mind. I open my mouth and out pours these ideas that are fighting not on my behalf but on the behalf of themselves, using the battleground of group consciousness as a place to persist and grow.

When analyzing memes it's important to eliminate bias when describing their spreading mechanisms. Take religion for example.

Continue reading...

Memetics

Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced it.

Thought contagion theory begins by inverting the age-old question of how people acquire beliefs, focusing instead on how beliefs acquire people

Professional matchmakers also play into the picture, but not in as direct a way as one would expect. Matchmakers who charge for using astrological methods compete with those who don't. But the astrologer matches by arbitrary criteria that produce dead-end courtships. Ironically, that causes customers to come back and pay for return visits. However, the matchmaker who succeeds in making sensible pairings looses customers more quickly, since more of them find satisfying relationships. These differences help the astrological service expand and take on new practitioners. It's another viral mechanism for astrological compatibility ideas to spread, not just despite their flaws, but because of their flaws.

Memes.org :: Memes are Mind Viruses

I picked up a magazine called "What Is Enlightenment" which was less enlightening and more informative. Here's a scan of a page [200+K] that I thought was an interesting way to model meme evolution. (Oh yeah, I just bought a new Scanner, HP Deskjet 7130 (all-in-one)... seems to be working well)

Meme, meta-memes and politics by Keith Henson
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our times,
starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with "It's raining
DNA outside." He goes on to describe a willow tree that is shedding fluffy
seeds far and wide across the landscape. The paragraph ends: "The whole
performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in aid of one thing and one
thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Not just any DNA, but
DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow
trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks are,
literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. They are there because
their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. It is raining instructions out
there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading
algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any
plainer if it were raining floppy disks."

I like the metaphor that the human mind is the substrate, or primal soup, for memes to emerge to life.