Been feeling like I have a lot of extra time on my hands and I feel so addicted to just scrolling twitter, opening YouTube videos and not watching them, scrolling whatever. I can scroll and just not mentally sated. I feel like I'm not doing anything productive at all. Not working on my website, not reading a book, not even digesting articles, not listening to music with conviction and I don't know, just. Not letting myself get bored. Only been feeling this way for the last week or so. Hopefully my mind gets bored enough and I pick up another project soon.
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Also, I remembered why I found this so difficult, because this book is just full of names and references, and I'm so bad with, like, remembering names. It goes on so many tangents of references that this comes from this author who was born here and was friends with this author who wrote this book. And, yeah, it's a bit overwhelming.
The most important differences are these: while variations in genes are purely random, memes are also subject to conscious variation, intended to achieve desired effects; and while genes are rejected only if their host fails to reproduce, memes can be rejected intentionally by their host. A human mind has purposes of its own and is capable of modifying memes in its efforts to achieve those purposes. Moreover, a mind contains ideas which it has created itself, ideas which have never existed, and will never exist, in any other mind. So such ideas are not memes.
what makes this eerie is that the meme accumulates this precision through evolution, not design. every variant that caused slightly less compulsion in the victim got out-competed by variants that caused slightly more. millions of generations of selection pressure, all bearing on the single question: does the damage reproduce itself? the result is something that looks like it possesses deep psychological knowledge about human weakness, because it does, implicitly, in the same way an eye "knows" optics. the holder doesn't understand any of this, and that's by design too. the less the holder understands the mechanism, the less able they are to resist it. understanding it even partially, which is what Deutsch is trying to enable, is already a partial defense.
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