Okay, sod asteroids, I'm back with a vengeance and an idea (or possibly an elaboration) I just had.
Spent the evening so far reading some quotes, listening to some great music and talking to a magnificent person (ye know who ye are), when, just as I was about to head up (indeed, should probably be in bed right now), the various threads of themes I've been pondering for a while have suddenly coalesced into an Observation.
People are Conway Patterns
To cite my main references in quick succession, I'd like to highlight Martine Rothblatt, who I think coined the word 'beme' and shares a lot of concepts with my personal take on transhumanism, a recommendation that readers go and muck about with Conway's Game of Life until they can see what I'm on about, and as personal experience reference my entire recent life
To start this possibly-rambling (I'm tired, might edit this in the morning, might not) observation off properly, I'd like to quote that eternal pre-emptive plagiariser of other people's statements, Oscar Wilde:
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
Now, good old Oscar most probably intended this as a witty remark degrading the so-called simpletons around him for their un-originality, in his self-proclaimed, we-all-want-to-punch-him-really sort of genius way... but I think he may have touched upon an important point of human psychology.
What is the essence of a person, an individual? it's the thing philosophers have been wrangling with for the last seven thousand years. Some don't even try and chuck it all onto some kind of "soul", others will enthuse that it's the memories of the person's previous present that governs how they respond to it in it's current form, and I'm probably somewhere in this group. some will say that a person's particular way of thinking and reacting is determined by a specific personal quirk of the neural architecture, like a thumbprint or a retina or an iris.
I posit that individuals are collective of ideas and memes, ranging fractally in scales of big ideas and cultural buzz and sub-concepts gleaned from throughout their development. These patterns of qualia mutate and interact with each other, occasionally merging and destroying each other or fusing into a larger meme-plexes that in tern wander off and interact with each other, cradled in a set of ridiculously simple rules.
Anyone who's had a really good muck about with Conway's Game of life and has a good observational mind will know exactly what I'm talking about here, right down to the analogues of 'glider' patterns. A sophont mind is, essentially, a very large semi-contained conway-esque fractal of memes and ideas with wonderfully hazy boundaries as to where it ends and others begin. To use Martine Rothblatt's term, a beme (I like that word, it sounds enough like 'meme' to establish the connection but can also be split down to 'be me', which is a perfect summary). Think of each idea as a black box on the grid, a box which in turn is a full grid with it's own patterns of boxes, and so on. If certain boxes are in the right place at the right time, a new one is spawned from their being there, which interacts with them to spawn new complexes, perhaps involving the original boxes disappearing. Each beme, each complex, occasionally gets it's boxes, ideas, in the right configuration to spawn of a collection of boxes off in a 'glider' pattern that goes off and eventually hits another beme and starts interfering with it in new and wonderful ways... and you quickly see a rather nice complexity-theory driven model for human sophonce creep up and bite you in the frontal lobe.
It has a wonderful synergy with evolution and computer science that appeals to all my main interests, and applying the analogy/model to things brings all sorts of new insights into our society and, to some extent, human behaviour. The whole veiw kinda reminds me of Anders Sandberg's notion of neo-taoism for the fictional colony of Penglai in his rpg setting... actually, Neo-Taoism is one of the major patterns in the complex-storm that's been dancing and evolving its way into me having this idea over the course of the last three days.
Dispite my current exhausted-but-loving-it state and the fact that I really should have turned in an hour ago, I'm really exited about all the prospects this thinking model implies, expect further musings and mini-posts over the next few days as I develop it.
will do more tomorr- *collapses*
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