Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

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By definition, a meme is an idea, image, phrase, or piece of behaviour that spreads through imitation—usually because it captures something funny, relatable, or sharply true about human experience.

These are as old as mankind itself. All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates. 'Music to invade Poland to' is a memetic concept, so is the dies-irae-theme in all music since the 1400s. Memes itself are 'sodgy narratives, and dinosaur-like news, history, or novels (hell, novels are meme-machines - they have sprung everyhing from quintessential fantasy races to actual mythofascist-occult ideas to bona fide suicide waves).

I'd argue that behaviours/media/ideas eventually need to be at least explainable to a significant part of a culture to become memes. You can explain 'Courage Wolf' to a completely uninitiated person of average intelligence in 30 seconds. You can explain 'Trollface' in a minute (with the whole cast in two more).

Skibidi Toilet escapes such explanations and is thus not, IMHO, a meme format. It's viral, not memetic, it spreads, but does not encode universally-understood meaning. There's no payload, just absurd emptiness.

> All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates.

This is quite the reduction, akin to claiming that my wife and I got married because human beings are a pair-bonding species - it checks out on the surface, but discards an incredible breadth and depth of human experience. I do not close my eyes at night and talk to a loose collection of ideas cobbled together by a bunch of random people attempting to outline a system of objective morality in the pursuit of societal control. I am participating in an eternal relationship with the author of truth and love.

> There's no payload, just absurd emptiness.

It's developed a commentary on internet culture vs. legacy media.

> This is quite the reduction, ...

Thank you, that spawned this notion in my head, I wonder why. It’s funny, I think, how quickly people dismiss the subjective experience of a crackhead having an ecstatic conversation with God or the universe — yet insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters.

> love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters

You can reduce all of human experience to chemistry, but you'd be missing most of the meaning, understanding, and wisdom of it. (If there is any, in the case of the cracked visionary.)

> insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters

To bring things full circle and quote a dead meme, why not get you a girl who can do both?

Reminds me of urban legends and it feels like the meme culture has replaced a lot of what urban legends used to communicate.

> These are as old as mankind itself. All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates.

I find the whole idea that thought equals memes to be excessively reductionist. It neglects the notion of coherence in thought, and the way larger coherent beliefs and narratives are built out of smaller parts. The thing about "dinosaur" formats like novels and books and such is that they can express large coherent bodies of thought.

The way memes have taken over online discourse tends toward a kind of anti-intellectualism where ideas are considered entirely in isolation and there is no effort made to relate them to one another. It leads to insane self-contradictory positions like "libertarian fascism" to give one random example. A lot of modern online discourse is what I might call meme salad, which like word salad lacks coherence.

It's sort of like describing a program as a bunch of functions or instructions. Yes, it is that, but there is a design, a coherence, a larger idea being expressed. There are also design patterns and motifs, layers of abstraction, etc. None of that is captured by the meme idea, and as popularly understood the meme idea tends to neglect and devalue that.

I also always found the selfish gene idea excessively reductionistic in genetics. Yes you can model evolution as survival of the fittest genes, but this neglects the way genes work together to form higher order systems that are themselves subjected to selection. Selection can operate at the genetic level but also at higher levels. In evolution look into group selection, the evolution of evolvability, epigenetics, gene regulatory networks, etc.

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