bookmate game
en

David Deutsch

  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program. If it is not enacted, it will not be copied.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    . In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    . In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    . In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition, and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    And, to do this, memes sometimes confer benefits. One difference from the biological case, however, is that, while organisms are nothing but the slaves of all their genes, memes only ever control part of a person’s thinking, even in the most slavishly static of societies. That is why some people use the metaphor of memes as viruses – which control part of the functionality of cells to propagate themselves.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    Static societies survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet the holders’ individual preferences.
  • lighty0079цитирует2 года назад
    Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness. (Ironically, creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.)
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