At 02:00 AM 20/03/00 -0600, Eli wrote:
>it occurs to me to worry about the
>nanomechanical equivalent of prions
It strikes me (changing topics rudely as a strangely attractive idea is
triggered) that the prion, used as a memetic template or exemplar itself,
might have a weird power to warp adjacent meta-memetic structures. Thus:
hile memes are, of course, almost defined by their contagiousness, I wonder
if there might be a class of memes that resemble especially powerful
attractors in cognitive/affective phase space. Like Vonnegut's *ice-nine*,
or prions, such memions would flip morphologically or functionally similar
but far more muted memes into their own hegemonic shape, in a burst of
cortical imperialism.
This picture somewhat resembles William Calvin's hexagonal cortical code
arrays, which tussle for literal room inside cortex; such notional memions
would presumably vary, like viruses or prions, from `species' to `species',
in this case ranging from couples or other small-scale users of micro-scale
dialects, through families and neighborhoods, to discourse systems,
cultures, civilisations.
The central idea proposed here, which for all I know has been suggested
long ago in the annals of memetics, is a kind of memetic structure that
takes the lowest available energy, and drags other similar memes into
drastic, rapid crystallisation. One might think of conversion experiences -
attacks of the memion!
Damien
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