opposite of a meme

[atheorist]

So memes, genes, and chain letters are a kind of thing, a message of some sort that may in the right host environment provoke a chain of events that yields more copies of that thing

Comments

[justbeast]

As usual, excellent post. Makes me think of several things

[atheorist]

Not environmental and learning; I mean the quality of identity, stripped of distinguishing information. A vortex in a stream has identity in the same way a human has identity (that is, you can track a particular vortex over time, even though its material is constantly changing). It also sortof has a metabolism - a long-lived vortex implies that there has been, all through its life, an energy gradient for it to "feed" off of

[justbeast]

I like the analogy here, comparing a starship and a person's mental life, with memes beaming in and out and doing who knows what etc

[atheorist]

Or smaller than a village - starwisps, or seeding interplanetary clouds with suggestive amino acids! Egan has a story where two travellers meet casually both far from home, and the basis for one asking the other for help is that they're both descendents of species that used DNA.

There's some things that are well-explained by the interior of a starship being something like a simulated environment - holodecks, replicators, beaming, everyone is roughly human-shaped except possibly for a polite ancestry-marker on their forehead, people are often interested in sex with people from other species (memes are promiscuous).