On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 10:03:40AM -0800, hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> That is what horrified the robots, the thought that their world could once
> again become a slave to a replicator like soft drink cans. The problem
> with this is that it is absurd to suppose that any human society can avoid
> memetic parasitization. By the nature of human communication, memes exist
> and spread. Yatima and Inoshiro are just as much slaves to their own
> replicative memes as we are to our soda cans and other consumer products.
When I read the passage, it reminded me of how culturally remote their
society is from ours. When we think of the ideas that motivated the
romans, many of them seem odd and alien to us. The same would of course
be true for the post-introdus posthumans. But this passage even hints at
even larger cultural changes, such as the death of ideologies, religions
and memes of our kind. The Commonwealth of Polises of course have their
own counterparts, like the pro-reality culture of Carter-Zimmerman and
the strict non-coerciveness of Konichi, but they may be based on very
different cultural mechanisms. Of course, that would be exceedingly hard
for Egan to describe in any comprehensible detail, just as a roman sf
author might have a hard time describing the idea of a society based on
contractual obligations rather than patron-client relationships and
family honor.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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