Re: virus: The Virus Homepage stuff

David McFadzean (david@lucifer.com)
Wed, 05 Feb 1997 16:49:10 -0700


At 11:13 PM 05/02/97 GMT, Dave Pape wrote:
>Hey wait a minute. I just looked at the Virus homepage (I think I found the
>list by AltaVista-ing "meme memetics mailing list", thus bypassing it) and
>am a bit upset that it does seem to have the intention to become some kind
>of alternative church.

Why would that upset you?

>If religions didn't have some element of benefit to the human race, why
>would they persist as memes for so long?

Because viruses of the mind exist for their own benefit.

>>If a new religion is designed around the premise of continuously integrating
>>better (more accurate, more useful) concepts while ensuring the survival of
>>its believers, it could conceivably achieve true immortality.
>
>What, do you mean until the sun goes red giant, or all the way, until
>everything decays to radiation?

The latter. Hopefully we (humans and their descendants) will settle
other planets before our sun dies.

>Another thing about established religions: they're continuously integrating
>better (more accurate, more useful) concepts, like eg Catholicism accepting
>the idea that the Earth moves round the sun, and other scientific concepts.

I wouldn't call the Catholic church very progressive when it comes to
adapting to new ideas. It took them over 300 years to admit Galileo was
right after all.

>No belief system remains static, surely? I rewire as a personality, as far

Some do. But they don't survive.

>AH: You're using "promise of immortality" memes as hooks.

Of course. Join us or die! (literally :-)

>>Everything is a system. All systems (except perhaps quarks) are composed of

>Lovely. I love this idea. And I love feeling really cheeky as I sometimes
>think "nah, I bet there are systems from which quarks are an emergent
>metasystem".

True. It could be possible that for every "elementary particle" we find,
we will discover that it is actually a system of something even smaller.
Recently I found a page on the web about "zero point fields" (ZPF) or
something like that which claimed that the idea that matter is really
nothing but information has a real theoretical basis. Unfortunately I
lost the URL before I could finish it. Has anyone else come across it?

--
David McFadzean                 david@lucifer.com
Memetic Engineer                http://www.lucifer.com/~david/
Church of Virus                 http://www.lucifer.com/virus/