Memetics

Okay, this is an essay I wanted to write as the result of a thought
experiment I tried at about 3 am last night. I don't know if it's
clever, old, or incredibly flawed, but if someone wants to write some
critiques they are more than welcome. I think I might have made some
unecessary repetitions...

The meme, a powerful replicator introduced in 1976 by Professor
Richard Dawkins. Since then the idea has exploded to propose answers
to such questions as language, religion, intelligence, and
consciousness. But this replicator is still in its infancy. It is
comparable to the gene, still swimming slowly in a soup of material
for replication.

Where are these speedy replicators headed? Being replicators, like
genes, one might expect them to proceed to a similar fate. Allow for
a moment a thought experiment. Imagine a world where these new speedy
replicators build their own machines and abandon genes altogether.

Any replicator capable of reproducing and surviving will do so, the
meme is no exception. These bits of information have managed to float
about occupying minds, books, language, manners, and chain emails. So
where to next? Where will they make a greater leap into more
advanced vehicles for protection? Memes have done well in propagating
themselves through the human brain, computers, and books. But what
happens when memes start to erect their own machines?

Imagine in the future memes leaving the framework of organic matter.
A meme and/or it's supporting memes that spread to a machine such as
a computer would replicate very well. Such a meme might be the desire
for longer life, or at least the fear of death. If in the future it
becomes possible to transfer a collection of memes (perhaps the human
mind) into a binary form involving computers or robotics, this would
undoubtedly happen.

Memes themselves for the construction of such machines produce those
machines, for now this has been done using the framework of organic
machines, that's us. But there will inevitably be a time when we are
unnecessary, when the memes no longer need the out-dated genes as a
framework.

We know that any replicator will survive on the basis of fidelity,
fecundity, and longetivity. Memes that have the power to construct
powerful machines to replicate themselves will ultimately win out. In
the future one can see perhaps gigantic machines composed of millions
of such memes. Memes that can band together to build powerful
machines to spread their messages.

As purely an example, think of a gigantic computer floating in empty
space made up of many different instructions (memes). The ones that
survive and thrive will be the ones that tell the computer to do
things to maximize the survival ability (ignoring for a moment any
outlaws/modifiers/etc.) of the computer. Such tasks as destroying
nearby threats to the entire machine (perhaps rival computers),
infesting other machines with its own memes, or producing more
machines will all be strategies that will become prominent in the
population.

Is this a possible vision of the future? Could memes take flight into
their own machines? Maybe, one day, the memes that have been so long
passed on through human minds (yes, this would include us ourselves,
all our thoughts) will transfer into new machines, lifting out of all
organic matter for a better spreading, longer lasting, and more
adapted, machine. I think it is entirely likely that perhaps, in the
distant future, the gene may be abandoned forever.

This is not intended to be some dreary version of the future, simply
a thought experiment on the power and future of a powerful replicator.

-Brad

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