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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

This was a much more poignant article than I was expecting

"The sign can come down but the airport is still there. The airport exists in the same way that songs exist. If you set fire to the scrap of paper on which Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday, that wouldn't destroy the song. E

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Coincidentally, I was thinking about this example today. The paper in fact is not the song. It becomes a song when it is sang. When it is given voice. In fact it is hard to say what the song is. You can play it with different instruments. You can play it in its recorded form on various media. All these will sound different. I was thinking "reality" is like this too. So I don't think the sign can make the airport.

This is what a meme really is.

The vast majority of our waking hours are spent pondering things that are not in the least bit real like this. Just memes that only humans are aware of and believe in.

This airport is as real as a song, as santa, as a country, a law, the value of money, words.

In fact, an overwhelming majority of things that we generally perceive to be real are only things that exist in the shared consciousness of human beings. The only difference between santa and a law is just how strongly people believe in and how many people willingly support the latter.

But santa and laws are of the exact same category of made up ideas that we choose to believe in and that influence our group behaviour.

Some things do exist, like the combination of materials that make up buildings that we inhabit.

But their meaning and purpose and ownership and the reasons we enter them and the vast majority of what buildings mean to us aren't in the least bit real.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find out that ant and bee colonies also share their own memes that help structure their societies.

And much of what we percieve as real isn't. Your senses are used as an input to a model rather than being available in a raw form and we percieve the model. For example your brain takes a stream of data from your eyes as they flick in different directions and different focus levels. But what you percieve is a fully rendered model with no edges and an understanding of depth. But it is always an abstraction. The yellow blob at the edge of your field of view may be a lion rather than a wheat field. And the car 100m away could be the size of a mountain.

And even there was a "real" airport - you'd face considerations like "Theseus ship"

Let's go even deeper: "Ship of Theseus" applied to intersubjective phenomena GP described. In one sense, any institution, culture, law or religion that outlives the founding generation is fully Ship-of-Theseus-sed already.

Perhaps every single utterance/communication of any intersubjective phenomena is already ship-of-theseus-sed by the time it leaves the mouth of the speaker.

Probably by the time the brain of the speaker has processed the thought.

The mere passage of time means that the original meme no longer exists in its original form. Communicating a single idea to another individual creates a wholly new slightly mutated copy of the original idea.

I don’t understand how what I wrote is related to meme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

you changed it to "internet meme"; he meant "meme" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meme

Ok. But I still don't get it. I wrote, "The paper in fact is not the song. It becomes a song when it is sang. When it is given voice. In fact it is hard to say what the song is. You can play it with different instruments. You can play it in its recorded form on various media. All these will sound different. I was thinking "reality" is like this too. So I don't think the sign can make the airport."

How is this related to a meme?

> The paper in fact is not the song.

Right. The NFT that claims to be the ownership of the piece of paper is the song...

<sigh>

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