WIP
So that short story collection started circulating again, There is No Antimemetics Division
I have finally caved and read through it. That was dazzlingly conceptual, and like any sort of highly creative thinking exercise, has me pondering tangents.
Potentially spoilers and memetic hazards ahead, reader discretion is advised. ALso like, go read it all beforehand if you want a more coherent experience?
A couple of things at first:
- I love the idea of the noosphere, that there is a conceptual realm which exists extant to and because of the consciousness of human beings.
- I love thinking about memes as things that exist in a more concrete way than passing glances at the idea promulgate.
- No really, ideas/memes are darwinian in a very real sense. I’m sure that someone has posited that consciousness might even be a kind of symbiosis for them, a substrate that they encourage
- Antimemes are somewhat new to me, and they’re a delight. They tickle my inductive reasoning bone.
- Have you ever thought of nerve cells as a separate thing that is in symbiosis with the rest of your animal cells?
- The shapes of the problems I solve on a daily basis only exist as fragmentary hints, but I have engaged with such things long enough that my brain is wired to detect those shapes.
- If i asked myself to take a step back and actually look at what I’m loooking at, I can start looking at the shapes my eyes see, and I can invert what I see with the concept of negative space. Paying attention to the presence around a thing.
- In some sense, antimemes are evidenced by their shapes instead of by the thing-itself that they are.
- The reality of reality of perceptual reality is that, actually everything is a perceptual flow of info, so like, actually there is always a layer of disconnect from the thing itself. Go far enough in this direction and the question becomes, what actually is all this stuff here. I can’t know it, so if I’m particularly paranoid, that could be infohazardous.
- Why do nerds want fiction as a substrate for consuming ideas like this? Why don’t we just have elongated Q/A docs like this that chain the burgeoning creativity and document it? I find conceptual fiction to be a bit of a chore at times, wanting more to follow the author’s foray into a train of thought moreso than keeping up with their very-often boring characters.