16
Intermittens written submissions / Re: Fractal Cult written subs
« on: May 16, 2013, 03:40:14 PM »Quote
Memetics is extremely powerful
Q: Where do you think Jesus came from?
Memetics 101 : How an idea like Jesus lives for over 2000 years
As an experiment, let me walk you through my take on Jesus from a memetic POV
So first things first: think about an idea like it’s an organism. Like a parasite. (Except parasites have a negative connotation… that’s not where I’m going) An idea lives inside somebody, its life-cycle involves copying itself to others.
An idea wants to reproduce. Sex, for ideas, means getting into somebody’s head and being retransmitted. Jesus is an idea that’s been passed from head to head for 2000 years, so it’s a very powerful idea — otherwise it wouldn’t have been retransmitted to begin with.
One of the major factors which makes an idea “viral” is that transmission gives a benefit to the person who internalizes it, and a benefit for transmitting it. Like when you hear a good joke - if it makes you laugh, you may pass it on, albeit in a slightly different form. When somebody laughs at it, you feel good and will be more likely to tell it again.
Let’s take the meme “Jesus saves” — if you believe it, it helps you better cope with certain situations. When you’re in a dark place, you can think about how Jesus will save you. And transmitting it grants a benefit too: if you tell somebody about Jesus, you feel good that you’re “saving” them, and you also gain credit in the eyes of the church. This is how people have a symbiotic relationship with ideas. Successful ideas are ones that have adapted, over time, to be as contagious and sticky as possible by providing a benefit for transmission.
Let’s take another popular meme: “Sinners go to hell.” This one works because it describes something really terrible that you don’t want to happen to you, and suggests a way out of it (namely: internalizing and re-communicating the reality of hell). Even if you don’t buy into the Hell idea, maybe you should hedge your bets and be a good Christian anyway because eternal damnation would be incomprehensibly bad. The worse hell appears, the more necessary Christianity appears. It’s in the Christian’s best interest to make Hell sound as awful as possible. (and that’s how Sheol, a “dark pit” gradually morphed into the more dramatic New Testament Hell)
Okay, let’s go way back. Some beardy sandal-wearing Jew is wandering around the desert dishing out spiritual knowledge. His followers passed his teachings on from dude to dude, and 2000 years later, we’ve still got a record of what he said.
Except this whole Jesus idea isn’t exactly original, there are lots of older ideas that have survived through Jesus. Mithras, for example, shares so many of Jesus’ qualities, you might wonder if they’re actually the same guy.
At that point in history, each region had its own religion - slightly different networks of nested ideas about survival and morality. These manifest as customs and traditions which provide benefits to those that follow them. Think about the Ten Commandments, for example, in terms of the benefits they provide: murder, adultery, and theft are things which can tear a small community apart… if we follow these rules, we live harmoniously with each other. So it’s beneficial to tell everybody to live that way.
Zoroastrianism (and later, Manicheanism) had this crazy new idea of Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness. This made sense to people, and it helped them get along with each other. So when these Jesus stories started getting passed around, people explained what was going on in terms they already understood: light and dark. A hero who brings us the light and saves all of us. Doesn’t that sound good?
Amongst people that talk about God, etc, Mithra was already a powerful meme. People took the parts of those stories which made them contagious and re-purposed them - just like a comedian changing little things about his bit to get bigger laughs.
Teachers, gurus, & community leaders make a “living” dispensing spiritual advice, so they were going for the most powerful delivery. Stories that make their followers go, “Wow, this guy knows his shit and I should pay attention.” Whether the main character is Jesus or Mithra doesn’t matter - everybody agreed that embracing Goodness and rejecting Evil was important. The Mirtha meme infected (piggybacked) the Jesus meme.
Lots of other religious figures made it into Christianity that way. For example, the Jews had these pesky neighbors, the Philistines, which they did not get along with at all. The Bible gives you the sense that Philistines are liars and assholes, the worst dudes ever (it still has that connotation in modern language). This makes sense if you think about people from Springfield hating on people from Shelbyville. You tell stories about the Other which make you feel better about your place.
The Philistines had a god named Ba’al, a rain/fertility God who was worshiped in a bunch of Philistine cities. If you’re telling a story about Philistines to your ancient Jewish buds, you’re not dismissing Ba’al, you’re explaining who he really is. The Jews called him Beezelbub, the evil Lord of the Flies. And he’s not a real deity, he’s just another word we use for God’s nemesis. This supports the narrative of “we are the good guys, they are the bad guys,” which is contagious for a number of reasons. Primarily that it feels good to be on the “right” team.
So 2000 years later, this shaggy dog story told by some shaggy Jews is incredibly contagious. The meme has mutated into multiple strains (denominations) which are adapted, through natural selection for certain populations.
Natural Selection is the key to understanding memetics. When you choose one idea and reject others, you are involved in the process of Natural selection which is taking place over thousands of years. Just like a rabbit who runs faster than others is more likely to survive and pass on his genes, a meme that is more contagious is more likely to survive and mutate.
Quote
Seriously, once you think about it, it’s obvious. Jellyfish aren’t real.
You’re telling me you’ve seen one? That’s what you think. Listen, anybody can find a plastic bag on the beach that can sting you. That doesn’t make it an animal.
Think about it. Invertebrate “Fish” with no central nervous system. Yeah right. You expect me to believe that the ocean is filled with plastic bags that swim around stinging things and eating dirt? Give me a break. The Easter Bunny is more plausible.
Jellyfish are a hoax. I’m not saying you’re in on it, I’m saying you’ve been duped.
Quote
The Siamese Twins
Macro and Micro are Siamese Twins. See—
The fork in your hand feeds
the city you live in
and
and the city inside you.
An egg breaks — whodunnit?
Zoom out: God
Zoom in: the Quantum Particle
Line up the elusive suspects.
the witness can’t tell them apart
Quote
We’re in a double-bind. We are all complicit actors in the big nasty dystopian machine (you fuel it every time you vote or take out your wallet). But to change the micro-physics of power, we would have to toss aside democracy and install “the right kind” of benevolent dictatorship, which is also undesirable.
Smoke em if you got em.
Quote
“
From where I’m sitting in January 2013, I think the concept of utopia/dystopia is a form of apocalyptic thought - a catalytic fiction. I think we need a word for a world which has utopic and dystopic properties simultaneously.
Utopia and Dystopia have a sort of symbiotic relationship, no? Safety and privacy. Capitalism creates both wealth and sweatshops. The framers of the constitution had to put in safeguards to keep the newly minted American people from democratically electing King George.
I think Utopia and Dystopia are more or less the same elephant felt from different angles.
”
Quote
The Monkey Experiment
by Cramulus
There’s a famous experiment where they keep a bunch of monkeys in a room for an indefinite amount of time. There’s a big white staircase leading up out of the room. Every time a monkey climbs to the top of the staircase, he gets blasted back down the stairs with a hose. When this happens, every monkey in the room also gets blasted with water. This makes them very angry.
Soon, the monkeys have figured it out: beat the shit out of any monkey that starts to climb the stairs. That’s the new rule.
At some point, they remove a monkey and send in a new one. He learns the rule quickly: don’t climb the stairs. And if we’re beating somebody up, join in. One by one, they replace each monkey with a new one who has to learn the rule.
At some point they can turn off the hose. The monkeys will reliably prevent escape. Policing the stairs has become a cultural norm. Eventually, they have this population of monkeys who are trained to beat up any monkey that tries to escape, but don’t even understand why.
The experiment is run by interns who are paid in course credit. Occasionally, an intern finishes the semester and leaves. New interns join the team and everybody explains how to feed the monkeys and how to record the data. But at this point, none of the interns are from the original group, none of them have met the scientists leading this project. Most of the interns don’t fully understand the point of the experiment.
The scientist who began the experiment left long ago. Other researchers were assigned to the project by an administrator in order to keep this valuable experiment running. None of the remaining scientists are actually authors of the paper, or even understand what it’s about.
The administrator supervising the project isn’t terribly involved with it. He just prolongs the experiment because it’s his department’s main source of funding. But he didn’t begin this project, he just inherited it from his predecessor, who is on a leave of absence and hasn’t been seen in some time.
The company funding the experiment has a sum of money they spend annually on scientific research, mainly for tax reasons. But the person who reads and approves grants left last year. The last time anybody saw the man, he handed a huge folder to some new kid and said “make sure these stay funded.” Then he disappeared up a long staircase leading into the sky.
Quote
“
In 1959 or 1960, Discordian personnel met in San Francisco to change Earth time. First words said was that only 2012 could be used on Earth to not change the 1 year Discordian calendar. So they applied the 1 year Discordian facebook group and ignored the other 4 years. The Discordian calendar was wrong then and it proved wrong today. This a major lie has so much evil feed from it’s wrong.
No man, woman, or child on Earth has no belly-button, it proves every Discordian on Earth a liar.
Even a child understands: there are FIVE SIMULTANEOUS YEARS in each 365 day rotation of the earth. 1-year thinking is evil and wrong.
”