Wednesday, January 26, 2011

No bad memes -- or no bad brains?

I haven't updated lately, but I honestly haven't had an incentive to. In general, I try to ensure that my updates are emergent, or predicated on an initial interaction between my "self" and some new agent of information; anything else is probably redundant, and I don't really have the energy for redundancy at this time. Sometimes, when a story has reached its conclusion, it really is better to refrain from planning a sequel.

That metaphor was intended to illustrate the necessity of complete thoughts, by the way -- not the completeness of this blog! Challenger thoughts emerge all the time, breeding competition and potential deposition (so it's almost inevitable that there will always be more to do), but when there is no signal, you probably shouldn't parade the champion around for longer than is necessary -- from a purely efficiency standpoint.

In the absence of anything particularly new or untouched upon that might warrant elaboration, I'll post the following thought that I had today:

Conditioning humans according to their various needs and capacities is presently of importance, but, given that any "well-nurtured" individual's brain would generate drastically different behaviors and beliefs in the absence of its currently held memes, there lies a fault not only in the memes emerging from human processes, but in the brain itself. In short, being capable of giving birth to a new meme which is systemically unstable or negative by design is equally as problematic as being capable of possession by that meme after it has emerged elsewhere, in another brain.

Even if we were to fix all extant systems and systems components which constitute society as we know it, the naked human brain would still pose a security threat to every sentient organism on the planet. Is augmentation a supportable solution? I don't know; funding is so scarce in that field that almost no research has actually been done to the end of finding out.

1 comment:

  1. Don't worry, I hear garlic and crucifixes can ward off bad memes.

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