0xc0495d62…0330sent to0xc0495d62…0330·#21,249,006·view on Etherscan
Lately find myself revisting "The Selfish Gene (1976)" by Richard Dawkins. Over the years some of his public statements have been something I've disagreed with largely, but he, along with Hitchens, who passed away a while ago, though absolutely incomparable when it comes to putting forth arguments with rare spontainety, I suspect, out of frustration at geopolitical events, had made quite a few despicable statements which are, let's say, premature, and surprisingly statements of the hivemind. But still, one cannot ignore their tireless mind and effort and work. Hitchen even more extreme and acerbic, rarely anyone could stand against him in a debate; do miss his unsparing, erudite and intimidating presence, a sense of recall of information and knowledge i've rarely seen in an individual. And he is forgiven for just saying this alone when asked about free will:
"Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it."
I was talking about Dawkins, but one cannot talk of him without, at least, mentioning Hitchens. They were closely tied, both ethically and in their personal lives.
It's extremly pertinent to mention that, and it is only symptomatic of the ecosystem we're in, that the inventor of the word "meme" has himself not been tokenized yet, or not that I'm aware of. There were analogous variants of that term before Dawkins coined it in the book, but the exact word is his and was first used by him. I'm not surprised one bit but still i cannot hide my astonishment. And I hope to whoever that it stays this way - because I'm not saying there should be a token called "Dawkins" that is also successful, I'm saying that the fact there isn't one or isn't one that has been successful or "leading" proves most of my suspicions right about the ecosystem, all over again. The sense of ahistoricity, among other things, chiefly. An ecosystem supposedly at the cutting-edge of human frontiers, one of the great disruptors of the century, but inside completely devoid of what was got us here.
Especially when "memes" are what have been entirely driving the ecosystem and its expansion, so much so that even strictly utilitarian (whatever that means) endeavours have eventually bowed to it and are trying to incorporate them to stay relevant and survive, even institutions want a piece of the meme pie.
"...if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong." - Dawkins
I went back to it because I wanted to go back to "meme" and what I had scatterdly spoken of much earlier, call me anything, and dissect it and propose that we try and subvert the idea of it, I wanted it to go down to genetics and memetics, much like Dawkins did when he invented the term, and how it applies to the world and cultures at large. Although in construct, memes in the ecosystem are following the same logic of what Dawkins has spoken about, but it lacks qualia, or I haven't seen one which posessess it and is self-aware about it. There might be outliers who do possess qualia, but they aren't self-aware.
I don't know about you, but this poses interesting questions to me, about Firstbase, this ecosystem, and humanity in general. I have, like I said, proposed and discussed this very early on, but I don't think I can discuss this enough. Although I do wish I could discuss this with the meme-experts of this ecosystem on a level which goes beyond the set "narrative", "meta", and things they have been conditioned to, because it is market-coded. But the exploration of this is something I'm very optimistic about, on the contrary, because the audience has been set, their incentives are aligned - which is making money, which is a very sound and indisputible incentive in the world, it is only a matter of having a set of individuals who are also keen on exploring origins, what has led us here, trading and speculating on animals of all kinds - cats, dogs, monkeys, characters; then genitalia, missed bullets, phrases, disorders, and what not. So the internal logic of why they are what the culture wants and has capitalized on are all on point and according to what Dawkins and later others have expanded upon. But the qualia, the etymology, the history, its exploration and its significance remains a large lacunae in the ecosystem. It's frankly absolutely baffling.
Although my limited exposure to this "crypto" zeitgeist may have me ill-informed and prejudiced, so I do hope to be countered and proven wrong and corrected and "informed" in any of my statements.
Otherwise on the surface, things look, well, on the surface. Interestingly, this absence of qualia, historicity, and all of what i've suggested, this absence of the "father", the "dawkins" in the meme, or even the awareness that there is a father, is what is subjectively making AI thrive and their agentic narratives seem more plausible and spell-binding. Because they are speaking, often, more intelligbly than human participants, chiefly because they have been data-fed with historical sets, which the participant humans aren't, because they're supposed to, not mandatorily, but consciously acquire information and their sense of history and existence through living life and absorbing the past. So what is seeming astounding is merely wrongful juxtapositioning.
There have been a few rather exciting developments, discussions and thoughts and ideas, internally, towards implements that relate to Firstbase and the exploration of these with the hopes of more meaningful engagement, but I don't want to speak prematurely. Expect to hear more on that soon.
I'll end with another Hitchens quote, which he said about the Televangelist Jerry Falwell, after his death (attacking his human depravity and hollowness, for the uninitiated):
"If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."
I do hope this is not true of our ecosystem as well.