https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uZl9qmMLUtI
I’ve been looking at this true telos thing, because it’s different than telos, right? It’s true, right? So there’s some objectivity. There’s an objective space that’s being mapped by the memes. And I’m just looking at that, and I’m thinking, well, OK, so you’re going to build a theory about memes that’s going to map the territory of memes that the memes have already mapped. Right. Well, that’s a good point. So it’s like, why don’t you just use the map territory with maps that already exist? Yeah, when you start zooming out, you just get into these circles, and it’s just ridiculous. But these people seem to be insistent that they can create the new. It’s like using a lens to look at history and say, oh, history changed. It’s like, no, it didn’t. History is still the same. The fact that you observe it differently doesn’t mean anything, right? And you changed. Yeah, you changed. And John Vivek, he says, those religions don’t work for people. And it’s like, yeah, but that’s the people’s problem. That’s not the religion’s problem. Right, right. What’s changing? Well, that’s the objectivist danger, the individualist, materialist, objectivist danger, is that they can stand outside of these things, understand them in a way that you couldn’t before, or that people were too dumb, or they didn’t have the IQ, or whatever. Didn’t have the tools, whatever crazy thesis they have. And then, all right. Well, I’m here, remote, which is why I have a weird background and no board to write on. And we’re going to explore memes and the memeplex. And I’ve got Manuel Post, who’s always ready to do meanie things for us. And he proposed that we explore this topic and figure out what memes are, what the memeplex might be, and figure out where that goes. What do you have to say, Manuel, for that introduction? Yeah, so memes, they’re these crazy things that were recently dubbed in a video by Brett Weinstein as essential to understanding human beings. And at that point, I’m like, OK, they’re making a big deal out of this. I don’t think they have a proper understanding. I don’t think I have a proper understanding. So yeah, we want to explore that a little bit. So the problem with a meme is it’s like a pattern, but it’s different. It’s like a floating pattern in some sense. Right, well, to your point, I mean, I think it’s fair to give a little bit of background. Yeah, the thing that really spawned this was the Brett Weinstein, Jonathan Peugeot conversation that recently came out where he mentioned that. And so meme originates from Richard Dawkins. And there’s a way in which meme is correct. There’s a way in which maybe meme is not correct. And Brett made some bold claims about memes being the next generation of genes, but being beholden to the genes and being wrapped up in evolution, which is very much Dawkins’ claim in his book. So say what you want about Dawkins as a researcher or scientist. But he made claims in his book. And Brett actually pointed this out in one of their conversations, although interestingly, I think it was clipped out of later YouTube showings. I noticed that at least one of them. Where claims made in the book are not backed up by research. They’re just claims made in a book. So that’s important to know. I’m not saying that it’s wrong or right. I’m saying that there’s a difference between claims that are backed up and claims that aren’t. It’s important for the science people, you would think. It’s important for me too, because I’m a big fan of actual science and following the scientific method. And I think it’s too easy for people to stray out of that, especially with a book like Dawkins wrote. And then also, I want to point out, so the memes and the memeplex, as they mentioned by Jordan Hall, and then there’s Egregor. And they mentioned memes in the Egregor talk with BJ Campbell. He’s been on the Stowa. And I think Rebel Wisdom talking about this. This topic of memes and the memeplex and its power, they’re using the postmodern conception of power. Not my definition of power, by the way, which is slightly different, slightly more, we’ll say, agent-encouraging for individuals, ironically. And so this is a big topic. And yeah, if you’re right, if it’s important, we should seek to understand it, whether it’s you and I, or you and I and everybody else, or whoever’s talking about it, we should really seek. So that’s really the genesis of why we’re digging into this. And I know we’ve talked about these topics before, because part of the model set is this way of accounting for memes. So we very early on, like two years ago now almost, figured out where memes sit in the framework that we’ve been working from and why that’s important to understand. So yeah, I just wanted to add that extra context. This is a big topic. A lot of people are talking about it, which really spawned by this Bret Weinstein, Jonathan Pichot conversation. So yeah, what do you wanna fill in there that I might’ve missed? Yeah, so that reminded me, memes are there from the evolutionary frame. So they’re specifically designed to be understood in an evolutionary schema. So the memes are things that persist over time in cultures. They’re supposed to have this separate layer from the genetic information, which has a higher evolutionary rate, right? Because you can replace memes and you can improve them fairly easily while making improvements in genetic codes is, well, tedious, but it’s not a thing that humans can do yet. So, and probably won’t be able to do it in a good way. So, yeah, so the memes are supposed to be viewed as these carriers of information that, at least in Weinstein’s conception, provide the individual and sometimes the individual as part of a collective with extended adaptability to their environment. And that’s the justification for their existence. Now there’s this problem, right? Because now there’s a whole bunch of genes that don’t seem to have that quality. And then when you wanna have an evolutionary argument, you’re gonna have to make a justification for these more complicated memes. And the place that we will probably will be going is the interdependence, right? And the relationship and then the dynamic relationship within the individual that has embodied participation in the world. And the meme needs to be translated into something that’s actionable, right? And a meme like grasp, right? Like that’s fairly easy to communicate, but a meme, right? Because I’m just using words as memes now, but like meme like hope, yeah, try and communicate that across people. Right, well, and I think, look, I mean, I’ll just say it flat out. I think the meme theory is wrong. Like I think it’s a projection of some individual who wants to have control over evolution saying, oh, the new evolution is language-based, right? Or maybe not only verbally language-based, right? But symbol-based, which is ironic because they deny symbolism, we’ll say in the Bible, right? In the religious texts, in the wisdom texts, but they want it in the meme. They’re like, no, no, we control the symbols now. It’s like, I don’t tell symbols work, right? If you buy Carl Jung, symbols are not optional, right? They exist roughly in this collective unconscious. And there’s something to archetypes for sure. Like, I don’t see that as an optional or manipulable thing, right? It’s not something you have control over, archetypes, memes, I don’t control any of this stuff. But then for me, memes really are this attempt to create cohesion. The problem with that is that the meme, I pointed this out to Joey, he runs the Bridges of Meaning server, right? Cause he’s a meme master, he’s great at memes, he’s wonderful. The meme means something different to different generations, which isn’t to say it’s not alike enough, but at some point it’s not gonna be, right? So if your meme references a TV show like The Office, that’s great for people who’ve seen The Office or understood The Office when it was on or shortly thereafter. But over time, these things drift, just like language does, just like verbal language does, or written language, they drift. And that drift is actually really important because you lose the sort of original context. And then the meaning changes, why? Because meaning, as I’ve pointed out in a previous video, is content plus context, right? So meaning doesn’t just cohere with the symbol. Like that’s not how symbolism works. It’s not a language where it’s not how words, words don’t have meaning, right? That’s my thesis from that video. So memes are gonna suffer the same drift over time. And if you think we’re captured by the memeplex or whatever, I think memes are slaves to us and we are not slaves to memes. Like I don’t know why people keep doing that other than they wanna control the memes and therefore control what they think of as evolution or the next step in evolution or whatever. That’s how Brett Weinstein talks anyway. I find it very disturbing, or maybe he doesn’t talk that way directly, but it’s clear implication from what he’s saying that that’s the way he’s engaging with it. Yeah, so what is the context, right? Like I’m thinking about a ghetto blast, for example, right? Some people probably don’t know that. I’m thinking about the word that they’re listening to this. And other people have a lived experience with this ghetto blast, right? So it’s not only the thing that they know from TV, but they’ve had the friends and they had parties around this ghetto blast, right? And so when you create a meme, right, around this ghetto blast, the way that people can relate to that, right? That meme creates the connections that they can make is different. If you go to religious memes, right? Like the things that are written off in the Tao Te Ching, because I think the Tao Te Ching is maybe the best example, right? Because they’re explicitly trying to capture fundamental relationships, right? It’s like the vessel is empty and emptiness in the vessel is determining the vessel, right? Like now we’re talking about a universe, right? Like every human that’s gonna participate with that line actually can have a relationship to that. And it’s like, yeah, well, maybe you don’t use the vessel to carry water to your huts every morning or whatever, right? Like maybe that’s not your relationship to the vessel, but you use the vessel to get your water to your mouth at least, so. Yes, yeah, no, you’re right. Your relationship and other people’s relationships are similar, but not the same. And then what is the essence that we’re getting at? Well, when we collapse the meme to meaning and just say, oh, meme and meaning, every meme has a meaning, right? We’re collapsing it to a single meaning, that’s always bad, and making it universal at the same time. And both those are bad moves. There are two moves and they’re both bad. And we wanna do that for control, right? And for understanding. Understanding first and control second. Like when we understand something, we can control it. That’s implicit. It’s implicit and people don’t get it. Like when somebody says, I wanna understand something, what they mean is they’re moving one step closer to controlling it. And- Well, yeah, because the understanding has to happen within a telus, right? Like there’s a context that’s- Exactly, exactly. Yeah, they don’t understand the final cause is drawing you to the formal cause in that case, right? It’s drawing you to figure out, to stand underneath it so that you understand it, so that you can move it. But where underneath is, is determined by what’s on top. What’s the final cause? What’s the telus? What’s the thing? What’s the emanation that you think you can enact, right? As the result of your understanding. Otherwise you don’t have an understanding, right? You may have an appreciation, but you don’t have an understanding. And there’s no need for one, right? If you’re not trying to do something with the thing and we get caught up in that, right? It’s like, well, a lot of people, like I don’t, I mean, I enjoy some memes by certain people like Joey. A lot of BOM memes are funny, but other memes I don’t. And that’s cause I don’t have the references, right? I don’t know what that means, right? I have no idea. I have no context or maybe I don’t understand the content because sometimes they reference shows or video games that I have no awareness of whatsoever. And sometimes it doesn’t matter, right? Cause sometimes there’s, right? You’ll notice means have gotten less specific over time. Now you’ve got the generic MPC memes and stuff and it’s all expression-based. So we’re back to facial expressions. It’s very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, well, and that’s part of making these connections. And the question is, where is it that memes live and what are they trying to connect? And I think the model that we have is, well, there’s this thing called historical grounding at the bottom of everything, right? This historical grounding. And then what you want to do is you wanna connect that historical grounding to something in the future, right? Through the present. So you wanna a through line, right? You wanna coherent, intelligible, golden thread of intelligibility to invoke a Peterson in the Verbecky talk. And that happens in what we were referring to as the realm of transformative coupling. In other words, it’s part of the imaginal space that exists in your head, right? But not only in your head, right? Where you can draw these connections, right? You can make these connections. You can have this, dare I say intimate, intimate connections with things, these quality connections between different things to draw you out of where you are today or where you were yesterday to a better place in the future that involves potential. And the question is then, well, where is that place, right? It’s not arbitrary, but you need a space to put it. And I think the realm of transformative coupling was a good way to think about and talk about that space because in some way, when you move through time, you are transforming, right? You’re changing. And you need to change in a way that connects the past to where you’re going, right? It can’t just be an arbitrary change. And I wanna introduce this idea and I think it’s gonna call you in the distinction between a sign and a symbol, right? Yes. And it’s hard, right? Because an emoticon is in effect a sign, right? Like it’s pointing directly at the facial expression, right? But the facial expression can be a symbol, right? So there’s some complexity, right? But in essence, at least, and maybe we should make a distinction between the memes that people are creating on the internet and the scientific definition that people wanna use. But I think there’s a reason why the memes on the internet are called memes and that’s not by accident. But a meme on the internet is designed as a sign, right? Like they’re trying to make a specific linear connection, which is drawing upon a current event often, right? Like that’s the context and then it’s also drawing upon the historical grounding, right? Well, what would I call it? Well, it’s the thing that allows you to have a relationship to the context and then that’s pointing at something, right? Which either is something highlighted or something in the future. So to highlight something current. And so if you look at that functionality, right? A scientific meme would fulfill the same function in the sense where it’s like, okay, you could, for vaguely talks about psychotechnologies, right? And technology as such, I think are memes, right? Like there are things that enable you to do a thing. And so maybe they’re not a specific meme, but they’re a collection of memes that form a structure that can grant you certain capacities, right? But you can imagine like, well, if you wanna make a bow and you do that in one place, you have a specific type of wood, like that bow actually functions, right? And if you do this similar operation in a place where you have shitty wood, the bow won’t shoot. So the memes and their functionality are dependent upon a whole bunch of contexts that aren’t even dependent upon the human that’s interpreting them. That’s just the allowances of the world that the human is living in. Yeah, yeah. And I think the Dawkins concept and the concept Brett Weinstein was pointing out was more around this ideas as memes, right? And therefore ideas are evolution and therefore we can evolve ourselves. And oh, guess what? Guess who benefits from that? Just coincidentally, the smart people, the people with the high IQ, of course. Of course it’s us who are gonna lead us. And I don’t buy any of it, by the way, I think it’s garbage. But I think ideas are powerful and they’re important, but they’re powerful and they’re not necessarily good. Right? And so I think that’s where everyone goes astray. They think, oh, well, I’ve got smartness is goodness or IQ is goodness or being able to control ideas is goodness. It’s like, no, I don’t think so. And we can wrangle ideas using logic, reason, and rationality. Well, maybe not. Like maybe there’s justifications that defy logic, reason, and rationality. And I think with memes, you’re right about the linearity and the linear nature of them, right? It’s connecting usually a TV show, right? Which had a context, right? And then a piece of that TV show, a character in it, right? Or a scene, a particular scene that’s already got this context. And then you change the nature of the message by adding text into that picture, right? And so it’s a picture plus some text or it’s text plus some text or whatever. It’s usually a picture background though. And those are ideas, but what kind of ideas are they? They’re not the kind that are represented in normal speech. Right? They’re not easily represented in normal speech. That’s why they’re so catch. The picture is a thousand words. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Why? Because the picture is so good. Exactly. Why? Because the picture carries more context. And I think that’s super important. The picture carries more context. Well, then there’s the context from where the picture came from. Oh, we have the shared experience of having watched the show like the office or having seen this XKCD cartoon or whatever, right? And then the people with that shared experience, yeah, the meme works great for them. But then other people don’t necessarily get the same feeling even if they get the same contradiction from the wording, because a lot of memes are contradictory wording. It’s a statement at the top, a statement at the bottom, and they’re mere contradiction. Or there’s a conflict between them that’s not easily resolved, we’ll say. And that’s part of the problem is that that change due to the lack of context or the additional context means that you’re not sending the same signal. You’re not sending the same message, even though the meme itself has changed. I mean, it’s the same, but my engagement with the past makes a big difference in how that meme’s interpreted. And that’s true for all the viewers of the meme. And that’s why memes are very temporary, because if you don’t understand the context of the show or the video game or the event that it’s pointing to, or your context is different because you saw it in a rerun or years later, or there’s a lot of shows that people point to, Leave It to Beaver would be a good example, right? People watch Leave It to Beaver now, which is a 1950s show about idyllic, I think it was 1950s, I wasn’t around. It’s way before my time. But it’s now seen as a parody of life in the 1950s, whereas somebody who watched it in the 1950s sees it as a wholesome, good map of how to deal with the world, like how their world was going in the 1950s, with dad at the head of the family, and then one of the silly siblings who’s kind of out of the box, everyone else is sort of like in the box, and it’s okay, like it works fine. But the way that’s viewed now is as irony or some kind of critique, right? It’s not viewed as some idyllic standard to be upheld as it was when it was broadcast. And so memes, the flavor’s gonna change just based on that over time. And there’s entropy involved. And there’s a lot of context that memes leave out, even though they add in a lot, right? They enhance the language by quite a bit. Yeah, so I wanna add this idea of life, right? So watching something live has a whole different experience than watching in a rerun or whatever. Because when you’re watching something live, you’re literally participating in the unfolding of reality. And then when you’re watching something back, like I used to watch a lot of computer game sports. And the tendency that I had is I never watched videos of stuff that happened, unless it was like really special in some way, right? But I would watch live events and participate in live events. And I’m not a fan of participating in live events. Like I don’t care about the chat. I don’t care about all of these ways of interacting. And I’m not looking at the scoreboard, right? Like I’m not cheering for a team. Like all of these things aren’t there. But still having the live interaction is different for some reason, right? And that just highlights how important context is. Like it’s literally enchanting my experience to participate live because I would never watch it if it wasn’t live. And that’s such a strange thing. And it’s probably the same with conversations, right? Like you guys are watching me and Mark talk because at least we’re pretending to have some value to present to you. But in general, you would never watch a replay of a talk that you had. Like most of your talks are boring. Like literally they’re boring and you would never participate in them if you knew upfront. So yeah. And then what’s the meme? Like let’s do a steel man of the idea of memes, Mark. Do you wanna start there? Oh yeah, sure. Throw me under the bus. That’s great. Yeah. I mean, there’s something to the concept that we have influence over one another as the result of our shared experience, right? And so I’ll invoke this concept of the shared imaginal space where I have an imagination, it exists in the imaginal. And then again, Carl Jung, collective unconscious, right? The imaginal is somewhat shared between different people. Why? Because we’re people. So we have a lot in common, right? And we have a lot not in common. We have a lot in common because we’re people. Some of our limitations are the same. In fact, many of our limitations are the same, right? And maybe most, at least from a physical perspective. And then because we have a way of imagining things in common, right? That it necessarily has similar constraints. So it’s in common. It’s not the same though. It’s not the same. That enables us to participate in the shared imaginal space. And what’s in the shared imaginal space, as I mentioned earlier, I think is the meme and the memeplex. Like memes are there, memeplex is there. And we’re making connections. We’re making important connections between memes, history, shared experience, right? And potential and the future. Or we’re pointing something out. I mean, that’s what memes do. They do allow us to connect things. And in connecting those things, connect with one another. And I think that’s the real strength. Now, I don’t think I can steel man the evolution case because I don’t think it’s there. I just, I don’t know how to do that. Maybe you can steel man that part. Insofar as connection is important and connection builds community, that factors into evolution. Sure, maybe, kind of, but I’m not sure I can steel man that case because I don’t buy any of it. Okay, so let’s, okay. I’m gonna presume some sort of objectivity somewhere for my argument, right? So let’s say there’s the platonic realm, right? And that has an objective quality to it, right? And then there’s memes, right? Which would be like puzzle pieces. Like their data points with possible connections with other data points. And then they can form forms together. These memes can form forms together. And these forms, they gather a structural integrity, right? So the fact that they have a set of connections will make coherence. And this coherence will give reliable adaptive advantages. I don’t, I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think that’s necessarily false. But now we’re in a space, right? Where what’s important in the memes isn’t the meme themselves, but now it’s the memes in groups, in specific formations. And then, right? They also need to have a vessel, right? Like a way of expression that is in an individual that’s capable of actually executing these memes, right? Like, let’s just take a martial arts form or whatever, right? You can communicate the martial arts form, but if you don’t train it, like you’re not gonna be able to act it out, right? And now you can say, well, we’re gonna add another layer of memes where we also have to do the practice and the tradition where we have the rituals that allow us to, but now we’re having such an interdependent network that the meaning of the meme in and of itself is almost irrelevant because all the meaning is coming from the contextualization of the meme in the structure of other memes. And that’s assuming that there’s an objectivity there. And I’m not even sure if I can grant that objectivity because depending on the capacities, right? Like we’re talking about genetic capacities, which is funny, of the individual, they can either access or not access a certain set of memes. And one of them is IQ, that’s an obvious one, but there’s also obviously physical limitations, right? Like if you ever practiced yoga, right? Like the angle of your hips as a man, is it gonna end somewhere where the women are able to go a lot further? And you can do a lot to improve that, but like there’s limits. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it’s hard to see how mere memes, because I think they are mere memes, are the things, the memeplex or whatever, which is roughly, I think what you were describing, right? Memes depending upon memes, memes depending upon context. Now we’re into the memeplex, and we’re captured by the memeplex, like people are not captured by the memeplex. I think that’s crazy talk, roughly speaking. That’s not what’s going on for sure. It’s observably not happening, right? We create memes, memes are not out there creating us. Not that things don’t have an influence, all signals, all messages have an influence. The question is, because all influences can be seen negatively or positively, right? I mean, look, if you’re depressed and somebody says, cheer up, you can take that as a positive or a negative. And yeah, depressed people are more likely to take it as a negative. That doesn’t mean people should say nothing. It doesn’t follow, like saying something positive is always better than saying nothing or saying something negative. That’s the definition of saying something positive. So there’s a way in which, there is not an objectivity there, but certainly an orientation. And that orientation can be good, bad or neutral. It’s not two things, it’s always three, right? And so, that’s sort of the danger of progressivism, which I’ve pointed out before, right? Or the idea of progress is that if you’re moving, it’s good. It’s like, no, that’s not necessarily true. If you’re moving, it might be bad. It’s more likely to be bad than good. And it might be neutral. And the problem with neutrality, well, sometimes you need neutral. You’re wasting time. You’re wasting time, energy and effort, right? You’re wasting your attention. And so neutrality is not free, right? It’s not free. Maybe a state, it may be a state that you need sometimes, but it’s not a free state. Like there’s still a cost, and maybe that cost is justified, but maybe it’s not. And that’s why you need to move towards the good as much as possible. And that’s why it matters if there’s a realm of transformative coupling, where we’ll say your shared imaginable space matches with your imagination to create action in the world, right? To make you an agent. And for you to take on your agency is for you to recognize there’s an imagination that is uniquely yours, an imaginable space which you can share with others, and that others also have an imagination. And it’s the alignment of those things that allows us as persons, right, to cooperate, and to cooperate in a certain way. And so there’s a way in which buying an electric car from Elon Musk is cooperating in the imaginal space of everyone owning an electric car, even though from a materialist perspective, that’s not going to happen. Like we’re nowhere near the technology. And by the technology, I mean the technologies, because you need to improve batteries by quite a bit. And you also need to change the chemicals in the batteries, because lithium batteries are never gonna work. You could make them a hundred times more efficient. It’s not gonna help you effectively. And they have a lifespan, and it’s fairly short, right, relative to other types of batteries, like Edison batteries last over a hundred years, for example, and lithium batteries don’t last like three typically. So you’ve got to change all the chemistry. Chemistry is gonna run out anyway, because materialistic. Electricity, we don’t generate enough electricity to run that many cars, right? And then we need to transport that electricity. So lots of changes need to happen. You can argue, well, if we get energy density down enough and motor efficiency up enough, but now you’re talking about making changes in several orders of magnitude, and that’s possible, but not likely, right? But there’s a way, and you can participate now by buying a Tesla. In the imaginal space where everyone’s gonna own electric car, and that’s gonna be good for the environment. And just because you’re using electricity, instead of gasoline, doesn’t make it good for the environment, right? So there’s lots of problems with that too. So you’re participating in his vision, and that’s why he has a lot of money, right? That’s why he’s so wealthy, that I argue that in my money videos, both of them, right? I talk about what money is, why Elon Musk has so much of it, and how he got it so quickly relative to some of the other wealthy people, and what they offered. And that’s part of the power of shared imaginal space. Now, again, it’s not practical. Like it’s not practical to go to Mars. It’s not practical to dig underground tunnels. It’s been tried many times before, right? Elon’s not the first person to try it, but you can still participate, and maybe that participation is good, or maybe it’s neutral, right? Or maybe it’s bad, because we should participate in something that will actually move the needle in terms of climate change, which electric cars will not do. We already know this, by the way. This is well studied, not gonna happen. So, you know, we have to convert all the electricity first so that we’re not burning any fossil fuels to make electricity. And without nuclear, that’s not even practical, like at all. So, right, there’s a long way to go. There’s a real long way to go, but in the imaginal space, it’s here now, right? It’s already here. You don’t have to count for time. You don’t have to count for change. You don’t have to count for any of those things. You can just imagine up a space where this is already true. But that’s where the whole memeplex and memes are dangerous, is that when you are stuffing the realm of transformative coupling with things that are impractical or improbable, or things that take up a lot of energy without a lot of return, you are using up your time, energy, and attention, your power, that’s my definition of power, on things that aren’t gonna manifest in any significant way for a large number of people. Now, it may be good for you, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with being good for you. But if it’s only good for you and a handful of your friends and less than 1% of the population, maybe it’s not the greater good, right? Because we get that confused a lot. So that’s where I think memes are, you know, they’re powerful for sure, right? There’s a power in them because signaling is powerful. Messages are powerful. Messages influence people. They don’t necessarily control them, but they do have an influence. Yeah, I wanna grab a little bit back on the moving forward. So when you keep moving forward, this is the idea of failing forward, right? But when you’re in movement, your discernment goes down, right? Because now your participation is in the movement. In order to be correctly aligned in the world, like you need to create points of emanation, right? It’s like, okay, like I’m now gonna assert this telos, right? And I’m also gonna recontextualize the world in relation to the telos, right, the goal. And now I can reengage in the movement. But if you’re moving, well, you can see it with the steam tanker, right? And the steam tanker is moving and then it needs to turn while moving, right? Like there’s all of this additional stuff going on where the turning now changes, right? Like turning something that’s standing still has a lot more accuracy than turning something that’s moving because there’s all sorts of other forces that are moving and that you have to attend to. And sometimes that’s a good thing, right? Because if you’re riding a bicycle, right, you use the momentum of riding the bicycle to stay up straight, right? So then the movement is actually beneficial in order for you to be able to turn effectively. So there’s all of these aspects involved in staying moving. And then you can imagine that if you’re moving on memes, right, especially if you’re thinking of them as signs where they’re making a linear connection, then you’re, yeah, what’s the best way to say it? Like you’re always shooting, right, through them at something. And I think that will just necessarily lead to disorientation because I literally try to envision how it works. I got disoriented as a consequence of trying to envision it. So I guess I’m just gonna take that as true. But yeah, like you can imagine that, like if you have a bunch of holes that you can shoot lines through and you’re moving, you can see how difficult it is to get anywhere, right? And then at a certain point, like you do stop for whatever reason, and now you gotta like make your ledger and say, okay, like where am I at? Like what’s my status? And then you get into crisis. Yeah, no, I like what you’re talking about with signs versus symbols. And yeah, I mean, I think one thing that a sign does is it points to something particular, right? And that goes back to particular versus intuitive, and so you’re stuck in the particular realm at that point, right? You’re stuck with particularity with materiality as such, right, you’re stuck in essence dealing with that as your say primary mode, right? Where the particular is super important and the intuitive is not, right? It’s not that you can’t have an intuition about what a meme means or how other people see a meme, you can, but that’s different from the meme having the quality of the intuition rather than the quality of the particular. And I think that’s really where it breaks down ultimately. And when you’re just pointing at things and saying, go here, start here, go here, go here, this concept here is important, right? Because that’s what a meme does, it highlights a quote important concept. You’re influencing people and maybe slowly, right? Ships turn slowly to your point, but you’re influencing people in a way that maybe you don’t understand. Because again, their context might be different from yours. So you may think that the meme is a sign and that everyone’s going to interpret the sign exactly the way you intend, but that’s not gonna happen. I think the same happens with language, right? I mean, I go over this all the time. I think that’s part of what I do on my channel. I talk about the way you intend, the way that concept is intended in your brain, right? And then you communicate it out. And then you’re doing that communication with the intent of making something perhaps slightly different happen in somebody else’s brain. And then there’s a way in which the communication actually comes out and points maybe in the correct third way, right? That has nothing to do with what you thought or what you wanted the other person to hear. Like I think that’s actually what’s unfolding. I demonstrate that or try to demonstrate that all the time on my channel and my various videos and a bunch of them, right? Is that there’s a way in which you can use a meme correctly without understanding that you’re using it correctly, right? Because you don’t understand the full implications of where that meme actually leads. Because memes try to be signs, but I think they’re symbols. And I think part of the problem with memes is that from the perspective of the realm of transformative coupling, they never leave. And they start at a historical grounding, which would be the show or the image or whatever, in that context. And then they go up and then they fall right back down. They never allow you to transform. They never allow you to see something different. They’re always dragging you back down into the history. Maybe a different part of the history, maybe a newer part of the history, but it’s not pointing to potential. It’s not pointing to the opening of the future, right? It’s not pointing to where you will end up. It’s just pointing to something that’s back grounded back in the history. So that brought up a couple of things, faith, hope, and love in relation to those. And then also there’s other thing, evil uses good in order to manifest. Because evil still needs a functioning structure and functioning structures are good, right? So they might be used for evil, but the fact that they’re functioning means that there’s goodness in there, because else they wouldn’t be. So it’s really interesting that, yeah, like, so you have the person that makes the meme, right? And they have an intent and that intent is not, well, it can’t be what they’re manifesting, right? Because they don’t have control over how it’s being interpreted, right? And then something else gets manifested. I think things become symbols as a consequence of your relationship to them. So that’s just a projection of Mark to see the symbols. But obviously they can function as symbols, right? Like I only said, right? Like the emoticon, like, especially if you reuse it, like a bunch of times in relation to a specific person, right, like now you get a shared association, right? Like so now there’s this symbolic structure that you’re activating when using the emoticon, right? So while using the same emoticon in a different relationship might actually literally be the sign, because there’s no shared context. And then, well, yeah, like, so we have this realm of transformative call point, right? So we’re, yeah, it’s really hard to think about it because I guess it’s just really hard to think about transformation as such. But there is an element, this probably has to do with the virtues and values that you’re holding in the moment, where you’re making a translation in, well, yeah, like, is that correct? I think you’re trying to connect something to a point of emanation, right? Because you wanna find the thing, right, the potential in the future that you can relate to and you can draw yourself towards, right? Like you can let yourself be informed by it. So, and going back to conversation, right? Like I also think that’s what’s happening in conversation, right, like you see a potential, right? Like you have a sense of like, okay, like I wanna say this, right? And then you’re trying to find the right way of expressing it while you’re talking. And I’m like, there’s different ways that you obviously can do that. But that’s essentially what’s going on. So, yeah, I wanna connect us back to evolutionary means. So yeah, right, like if you organize the world in fixed tell us or something, connect memes to the fixed tell us as a reliable way to generate the tell us. Maybe there’s a case there, but now we’re talking about a small subset of memes. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things you’re sort of indicating is what Jordan Peterson would talk about in terms of that shining star, right? That star in the distance, that that would be the emanation that you’re trying to enact by engaging in the realm of transformative coupling. Like, so what are you coupling? You’re coupling your past with your potential future, right? Through the present. That’s what the realm of transformative coupling is for, roughly speaking, is to facilitate that space. And so it’s constantly changing because the past is being created, right? The future is being created. Those things are not foregone conclusions, right? I’m not a determinist. I don’t believe that we live in a deterministic universe, right? I see the universe is full of potential and potential is gonna manifest, but not all of it can manifest because there were limitations in the world. Like there’s a limited amount of lithium in the earth. What are we gonna do with it? Because we can either make batteries out of it or do something else, but maybe we can’t do both. And that’s certainly true at some scale. And so that’s true, right? It’s true at some scale, it’s true. So what do you do about that? What do you do about the fact that there are potentials that can’t ever be actualized or become manifest? Well, you pick one. You pick a star, right? Now, if you pick the wrong one, maybe you can’t enact it. Maybe it doesn’t work. Like maybe you never get there, right? Like if you wanna be dictator of the world and you try, and a couple of people did not too long ago, then maybe it doesn’t work, right? Maybe you can’t, maybe you get a revolt. Maybe it just dies out economically. Maybe other countries come after you and blow you up, right? Like maybe it ends in despair when you realize it’s over and you kill yourself. I don’t know, like all these things have happened and they will continue to happen and not just in recent history. This is all over history. A lot of people don’t understand because they’re using memes as historical grounding instead of actual history, which goes back thousands of years at this point. They’re not getting a sense for the ground, proper grounding. They’re not getting a proper sense for patterns over a long enough time span that are repeatable, that are reliable, that are consistent. And instead they’re replacing them with intelligibility through memes, which as we pointed out, I think they’re unstable and they’re not good ways of intelligizing the world. And you’re gonna run into issues with them because they’re not designed to last in some way. They’re reliant on specific instances in time, specific types of participation that aren’t equal among people anyway. Not that any participation is, but at least you can see patterns that go back before the office aired, right? Or back before Leave to Beaver aired, right? Like there are patterns that are really old that repeat and that you can see, that you can engage with. This is a wisdom texts that give you those patterns. And why aren’t they full of signs? They’re full of symbols. Why aren’t they full of signs? Cause they’re full of symbols. The symbols actually have multiple entry and exit points, right? They’re the things that allow you to couple the past with the future, with the potential, not our potential, not the potential, right? But with some aspect of potential, not a specific one, you’ve got lots of options there. That’s what symbols point to, are your options in the connection. So I wanted to go to the psychological aspect. Why would you want to interact with memes? Like what do they do for you? So I think memes like humor, they have capacity to frame break. So there’s a component of insight there, or at least perceived insight. It also means might provide intelligibility, right? Which is perfectly possible, right? That also doesn’t say anything about the value of that intelligibility, right? Cause we might have intelligibility that’s unactionable. And then we feel good about it, but it doesn’t affect our lives apart from us feeling good. And now we’re deluded because we get the sense that something has changed because there’s intelligibility, but nothing has changed. And then there’s the social aspect, right? So we’ve been talking about TV shows, right? So what are we talking about? We’re talking about shared frames. We’re talking about in-group, out-group dynamics. Okay, I can participate in this meme. That means that I’m part of this group and therefore I have the special status, right? Cause I’m watching this TV show live, right? Oh, we have the water cooler talk. I’m one of the people that can participate in the water cooler talk. So yeah, it’s interesting that these memes can fulfill different functions for us. And if we have a consumer attitude, we’re gonna grab the themes that we want to fulfill the function that they fulfill for us. If we go back to the evolutionary frame, right? We should pragmatically choose the memes that fulfill a function for us in the moment. And again, that function doesn’t have to be connected to an evolutionary benefit. And I think this is where the problem seeps in with this evolutionary thinking is like for example, right? Like drinking alcohol conveys benefits until you do too much. So like, are you gonna have a meme in your society that promotes drinking alcohol? Like what’s the effect gonna be? Like it’s completely unreliable. Yeah, yeah, I like that you put it in a psychological context and you can see all the elements there and like our models are designed to account for psychology, right? And like other models clearly don’t. And I think that we can accommodate psychology in the model, right? That the grouping, the idea of groups together is very much the shared imaginal space, right? We have a shared experience and therefore we have a shared imaginal space. Sure, absolutely. Shared participation, we both watched the show even though we don’t live together, right? Anywhere near each other, we saw the same show. And maybe that’s insufficient though, right? Like maybe to get a good group, a good community, a good solid way of interacting with the world, what you actually end up needing is something more like reliance on others for physical things rather than just shared experience with a projection, right? Cause a TV show is a projection. Yes, right. Well, yeah, if you wanna invoke Taleb, talks about skin in the game. He’s got a whole book on it, great book. Yeah, maybe you need skin in the game in order to form a good community. And I think that’s right. I think that’s required. In order to have proper intimate participation, you need skin in the game. Cause otherwise there’s no meaning if there’s no potential for loss, right? Because if there’s no potential for loss, then what’s the game? Like really what’s the game? Cause there might not be any. It might appear, it’s easy to make it. If you think of progress as progress and change is good, then gains everywhere, like no problem. But that’s not true. It’s clearly not true. One person’s gain could be another person’s loss. I don’t think it is necessarily cause we can create value in the world. That’s my belief. I have videos on that, right? My video on economy in particular points this out. But that’s not always true. It’s not everyone’s always creating new value all the time either, right? So sometimes, my gain is somebody else’s loss. And that’s, maybe that’s good, but maybe it’s not good. Like it doesn’t resolve the problem. But if you believe in change and progress and all that stuff, then it’s all good. But then what’s the point? Like what do you, what’s your tell us there? What are you aiming for? What is the shining star? Is it a shining star, right? Or is it a black hole? Like, I don’t know. Black holes can look pretty shiny. They emit light until they don’t. Right? Like it starts out really good. And then you get sucked in and then you’re addicted, right? Or then you’re suicidal or then you’re depressed and you’re nihilistic, right? Whatever it is. So where are these, what are the signals we’re putting out? Like this goes back to Matthew’s wonderful maxim, right? Curate your signal. Yeah. Curate the signal you’re putting out. Create signal you’re getting in. Don’t watch the news. Taleb talks about this. Like, oh, I watch the news once every three months or something, right? Because, you know, from three months ago, because now you know what happened. Like in the moment, you don’t know what happened. They’re just reporting. There’s a bomb, there’s this, there’s an arrest, there’s that, whoa, what does that mean? It’s all noise. It’s all noise until the pattern has time to unfold. And we’re so greedy. We’re so selfish. We’re so instant gratification oriented now, now, now, that we’re looking at things like memes going, oh, this is something that’s gonna last forever. And they have the same meaning forever. And it’s not, it’s definitely not. And you can already see that. Like you can already see the ways in which memes don’t have the same flavor that they did when they came out, right? They don’t have the same flavor to all the audiences, right? They’re a very shallow substitute for actual, deep, intimate connections between things in the world, between our historical context and our potential future context, right? Between us as a member of a group, right? And us as the member of a different group, right? There’s all this differentiation that’s not available in a meme. Yeah, so I got a new way of using memes in this closure, right? It’s like, oh, right, I don’t know. Trump is bad, right? Post a meme, no, now I’ve resolved this, right? I’ve broadcasted my status to humanity. Right. And now I can psychologically close that chapter for myself and move on. So it’s interesting that, well, yeah, you see that, right? Like all of these psychological things, right? You already see the complexity because like one meme can, like the same meme can be used for these multiple things and you just go down the rabbit hole. And yeah, like, so what are you doing, right? Like you’re broadcasting to the world. Well, what’s a broadcast? Well, it’s not an interaction. And so you can’t have intimacy with the broadcasts, but you can have a high signal, right? You can have a high salient signal, right? So now we get into salience versus relevance, right? And it’s like, how do we have discernment within the memes? And I was talking about you having a conversation with someone else and probably not wanna listen back to the conversation, right? So there’s an aspect there where the fact that you don’t wanna listen back to it meant that it wasn’t relevant, right? Yeah. Or at least that the relevant information was only, it was time sensitive, right? Like give me the- It was in the moment. Right, it’s like, okay, give me the salt was something I could relate to in the moment, but now it’s unrelatable because the need isn’t there anymore. So yeah, there’s this complexity. I’m just, okay, I’m passing. Yeah, right. Well, it was either the need was in the moment or there was too much context required to make that connection, right? And once you make a connection, you may not need it again, right? So like once the work is done, do you need two? Like, I don’t know, you might, but probably not. Like most things, like you don’t need two dinners. It’s always the big joke in Tolkien’s second breakfasts. This isn’t the second breakfast. Oh, there isn’t? No. Right, there’s a way in which you don’t need, well, you can’t break fast twice in the same day, right? Like that doesn’t, right? So it doesn’t make any sense at all. But Emmy does that on purpose, right? There’s a reason behind that and it’s amusement, right? It’s to keep, what is amusement? Amusement keeps the novelty. Do you think you know where the pattern’s unfolding and then it unfolds differently and that’s funny? Not all the time, but very often, right? And to your point, it’s a way of frame-breaking and a lot of memes are about frame-breaking. They’re about not breaking necessarily your frame, but showing how somebody else’s frame is absurd. And I saw a meme like this recently that said, we’re all equal. And he said, well, then why do we need diversity? It’s like, that’s a good point. Like if we’re all equal, there is no diversity and therefore we can’t have it. So you gotta make up your mind there, kid. Like, is there equality? Is that the good thing or is diversity the good thing? Because they are at odds with one another. There’s a contradiction there for sure. So you can pick one. Like, I don’t care which one you pick at that point, you gotta get rid of one of them, right? And so it’s a good point. It’s not breaking my frame. It’s not telling me anything new. It’s funny. I thought it was quite funny, but it’s a good point. Right, as Carl Benjamin posted that by the way, on Instagram, I think, or Facebook, one of the two, maybe both, but I thought it was a good point. Like, yeah, is it equality or diversity? Because you can only have one. They’re contradictory. So you’re breaking some frame or you’re showing absurdity in some frame. And that’s useful. Like, I think humor is useful. I think that pointing things out like that is useful, right? The gesture is a useful character. The fool is a useful character. But when it’s not aimed at anything, because memes aren’t, like, there’s no king to aim the meme at, right? You’re just kind of aiming it at society or culture or fashion or something. We have to talk on that. You’re aiming at your projection? Or a projection, right. I mean, it could be anything. It could be any of those. It could be all of those at once. Like, there’s no, your projection could be correct. Your projection could be a correct projection of the fashion. The fashion could be a correct projection of the culture. Who knows? But I like that we went through culture before this, actually, it’s rather helpful. Because then we can point to memes are fashion. They’re not a genetic adaptation. They’re a fashion. And they will go away. They have been here before, by the way. People don’t realize that. Because again, people don’t study history or they don’t study it correctly or they’re reading the books and missing the pointers. I don’t know. I don’t understand why people don’t see the obvious patterns and connections that we’ll say a lot of us do see. So that’s what, to me, that’s what’s really important about memes is that this has happened before. This will go away. You know, there’s that old meme about one of the original memes, I would argue, right? Where they say, yes, we’ve made so much progress since the ancient Egyptians who drew cat pictures on walls, right? It’s like, because the internet’s full of cat videos, right? Yeah, there’s that old, that’s a meme, right? That’s one of the older memes. But yeah, I mean, the ancient Egyptians, they had memes. You know, we know this. It’s well-documented. It went out of fashion at some point, right? So these things come into and go out of fashion all the time. And they do have an influence. Is it a dark influence? It’s probably not a good influence most of the time just because it’s hard to be good. And especially if you’re not aiming at the good, I mean, you have to have a conception of the good to aim at. And that’s really difficult. Yeah, I just had an insight. I think the way that Brett is understanding evolution, he’s treating it as the discernment of true telos. Yes, yep, that’s, yeah. If evolution is discerning true telos because the evolution has a reliable interaction or something, right? Like in a reliable interaction is pointing out a truth, like a true relationship. So you can see that, right? Like when the polar bear is white, right? Like there’s a true purpose for the polar being white, but you can also flip that, right? Like the fact that the polar bear is white means that it’s stuck on the North Pole, right? Right, yeah. Yes, positive only. He’s doing a positive only case. He’s not looking at the negative case. Right, and well, I can make a bunch more stuff about it, right, but you can see that genetic evolution would necessarily have to relate to things that are stable across long periods of time because it’s a relatively slow process. If you don’t take that into the meme world, like the meme world is focused on the interaction realm as opposed to the existence realm or the affordance realm. So the time scale on which that realm exists is way faster, right? Because we’ve got seasons, for example, right? Right. There’s this cyclical nature where some interactions become not useful as a consequence of the passing of time. And so if the memes, right, like to have consistency in their evolution, would also map out the true pteloses, then you could backfeed those true pteloses into reliable capacities. And I think that might be where the mistake is because it’s not recognizing the severity of the dynamic nature, right, like people grow old, right? So like at different stages of their lives, they need different means to support them. And then the distinction between humans that we mentioned many times is huge. And then there’s literally the sequence in which they get into relationship with memes that’s also having an influence about how they interpret them, right? Because we’re talking about people who are propositionally stuck, right? And what do we mean? We mean that they don’t have the capacity to relate to certain memes or, better said, symbols in a healthy way, and that limits them in their capacity to participate in the world. And just the fact that that is an option, right? Like just the fact that such blockages can occur as a consequence of exposure in a certain way just throws like a lot of dirt in one. Yeah, and I like that you brought up, what’s the mistake that Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris and pretty much, you know, Lawrence Krauss and all these people make, right? They all assume telos. They don’t talk about telos generally, but they all assume it. They talk as if it exists. Pastor Paul VanDukele talks about this all the time on his channel, right, constantly. Like, oh, where’s the telos? What’s the language you’re using, right? What he’s really pointing at in most cases is you’re talking about a telos. You’re talking about a final cause, an emanation, something that you’re aimed for or that something else is aimed for without admitting it. Like you’re not stating where it comes from, what it is. You’re just pretending like it’s there, pretending like it’s being pointed to and that it is a thing, and then you’re not accounting for it at all in your system. You’re just kind of ignoring it, right? And that polar bears is a good example. I mean, I hate the example. I shredded it on one of Paul’s videos on one of my comments, right? The problem is that it makes a bunch of presumptions that are ridiculous. It’s like, well, the purpose of the polar bear being white is so that it can sneak up on the seals. It’s like, that’s starting in the middle, middle-out thinking, I’ve got a video on that, right? Starting in the middle of what happened. Like a long time before that, there was a lot more going on. And the fact that it happened that way is convenient, but it’s not the only way that seals could be hunted, right? There are other configurations. There’s other creatures that can and do hunt seals. And then it’s like, well, which one is evolutionarily more adaptive, the polar bear or some undersea creature that eats seals like a shark? Oh, well, that’s a good question because you’re not resolving that. You’re taking a single example in the middle, not accounting for how it started, right? Or how it might end for that matter. You’re literally just taking a snapshot in time in the middle and making a bunch of presumptions from that. Like, that’s not a valid way to think of the world. The world unfolded over time and you were born into it. You know, like Sam Harris, one of his two things he’s right about, right? You didn’t have much choice about that as near as anyone can tell. Like you were born into the world and there’s a bunch of constraints. The result that you have nothing to do with. Like there’s cultural constraints. You grew up in a culture that influenced you, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, right? And memes can only go so far to exemplify things to you. And they’re also constrained by the culture in which they were created. Like if somebody shows me a meme from India and I’ve seen them because I have friends from India, they don’t make any sense at all to me. Like I just, I can’t relate to them. It’s not my culture. It’s like missing all the context, all of it. It’s all not there. And they think it’s rather clever, but I don’t understand it. And sure. So is the memeplex real? Is it manipulating us or are we manipulating it? Is it reflecting our culture or is it trying to move us to a new culture? It doesn’t have a culture. Like the memeplex isn’t a cohesive single thing drawing people or pushing people or pulling people or whatever. That’s not what’s happening. And yeah, if you have a misapprehension of evolution and look, I mean, we can take the T-loss out of evolution. I don’t care. But then Brett’s conception is somewhat correct. Evolution is finding, we’ll say the true T-loss. Well, where did the true T-loss come from? Well, it had to come from creation. So account for that in your system. Like, go ahead. I mean, I think I know where that ends or begins in this case. It begins with something bigger than the system outside of the system that created the system because creation can’t come from within itself. That makes no sense. I know there are people that argue for that sort of thing, spontaneous emergence or whatever. That’s garbage. It’s garbage conception. It’s illogical, it’s irrational, it’s unreasonable. And it’s unnecessary, more importantly. You don’t have to go through those hoops. There’s a simpler solution. It may be more painful. It may require submission. It may require acknowledgement that you’re not the be all end all, the final form. Because you’re certainly not, if evolution is true, you’re not in your final form. So you need to get over that real quick if you’re an evolution believer. And there’s got to be a T-loss somewhere. They’re all pointing to it. And evolution also says there is no final form, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking back about the conversation of the polar bearer and it was mentioned about the behavior of the polar bearer. The behavior of the polar bearer is a thing that the polar bearer is not aware of. I don’t know where it went from there, but I don’t care. Because there’s this assumption that this awareness has some magical quality. I was just looking at my eyes in the video and I was like, well, I’m not aware what I’m doing with my eyes when I’m watching. Like I have no clue. And I bet I could become aware of it. So what’s the value of me becoming aware of what I’m doing with my eyes? Right. And now we’re getting into some really strange territory, because there is this assumption, and this goes back to explanation. The capacity to explain something has to lead to it. Right? Like the fact that I can say evolution, like what does that buy me? Right? Apart from intellectual masturbation. So it’s really interesting. So maybe we can use that frame on the memes. What does conceptualizing the world through the lens of memes bias? What does it afford us? Yeah, well, I would say nothing. I would say it’s a big fat time waster. It’s a distraction. It’s using up time, energy and attention for things that can’t lead to transformation, that can’t lead to forward progress towards the good. Right? Lead to forward progress towards something just won’t be good, most likely, maybe in some cases, but in most cases, it won’t be good, because going towards the good is hard, and the good is rare, and the good is what makes the good valuable. Right? Like anybody can massacre and be horrible to people and swear, and anybody can do that. It’s cheap. It’s easy. Right? Anybody can be a bad person. It’s easy to be a bad person, but it’s hard to be a good person. It’s a struggle. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time, energy and attention. It takes a knowledge and understanding of things, and I think that’s where we get confused. The wisdom that is required to be a good person is not equatable with the knowledge of the awareness or lack of awareness of another creature. And so when Brett Weinstein and John Breveke and Jordan Peterson, for that matter, talk about these things, they’re like, aha, we see behind the curtain. We see what’s going on with the polar bear and his whiteness and his way of approaching seals by covering his nose and all this stuff. We see it. And therefore we’re above it. Like we’re objective. Right? It’s like, no, you’re still embedded in the world and your understanding is limited in the same way as the understanding of the polar bear of his own awareness. Like that’s a limitation. And then you point out something else really important, which is awareness as such. Well, some being aware of everything is not an option, but even if it was, it wouldn’t be helpful. Why? Because most things are not relevant. Like this goes back to Breveke’s relevance realization. Most things are not relevant. Where I’m looking with my eyes is not relevant to the quality of the video necessarily. It might be a factor, right? It might be a factor if I’m like starting off all over the place and I’m doing this with my eyes and it looks really freaky, maybe. But most movements of your eyes that are within a certain timeframe and take a certain amount of time are fine. And they’re neutral to the video, which is not to say expression doesn’t matter, but I’m talking about eye motion as such, right? So you can’t be aware of these things and you don’t need to be. Like one part of being authentic is a lack of awareness or a lack of overemphasis on certain aspects. Like that’s part of authenticity. Like I’m just doing what I do because that’s what I do. So I’m not trying to change it to perform for you, right? Which is not to say there wasn’t an element of performance. We do these talks, we know they’re recorded, right? There’s an element of performance there. But the engagement in the real time sense making that we’re doing, especially lately, we sort of, hey, we don’t know anything about this. Let’s talk about it. It’s like, yeah, okay. It’s very little preparation. A little bit more this time than I’d say last time, but that’s because we were kind of like, what are we trying to talk about? Like, I don’t know. Like, but something about memes, why I want, there’s a meme thing out there. Like we’ve got to do something with it. And it’s only in the realization of how prevalent it is that you get the flavor for the conversation. But it’s also only the fact that we started with that, that we realized how prevalent it is, right? Like I didn’t come into this going, oh yeah, BJ Campbell linked it to Egregores and Jordan Hall was talking about it three or four years ago or something, right? And this is a topic discussion on rebel wisdom. It’s topic discussion in the Stowa. It’s topic discussion in this corner of the internet and outside of it, it’s topic discussion all over the place. Like that really didn’t occur to me until I paid attention to it. So there’s a power to paying attention. But when we think paying attention grants us this magical objectivity power, then we go astray because now we believe we have control over something that we don’t even have an understanding of. Yeah. I’ve been looking at this true tell us thing because it’s different than tell us, right? Like it’s true, right? Like there’s some objectivity. There’s some objective space that’s being mapped by the memes. And I’m just looking at that. And I’m thinking, well, okay, so you’re gonna build a theory about memes that’s gonna map the territory of memes that the memes have already mapped. Right. Well, that’s a good point. So it’s like, why don’t you just use the map territory with maps that already exist? I’m just, yeah. When you start like zooming out, you just get into these like circles and it’s just ridiculous. But these people seem to be insistent that they can create the new. It’s like using a lens to look at history and say, oh, history changed. It’s like, no, it didn’t. History is still the same. The fact that you observe it differently doesn’t mean anything, right? You changed. Yeah, you changed. And John Vivek, he says, right? Like those religions don’t work for people. And it’s like, yeah, but that’s the people’s problem. That’s not the religion’s problem, right? Right, right. What’s changing? Well, that’s the objectivist danger, right? The individualist, materialist, objectivist danger is that they can stand outside of these things, understand them in a way that you couldn’t before or that people were too dumb or they didn’t have the IQ or whatever, didn’t have the tools, whatever crazy, crazy thesis they have. And then, right, and then they do, like they can do it. They can explain that it’s not the people’s problem. It’s the religion’s problem. Yeah, and so what are they doing, right? Like, so they’re saying, I have this superior frame, the one frame to rule them all. And what is that gonna give us? I guess that’s the big question. Like, what are all these people looking for? What’s the meme that they’re trying to express? Because, yeah, we were talking about evolution when we were watching the video and evolution is not trying to find the answer to anything. It’s trying to find the capacity to generate the answer, which is a completely different problem. And I guess you wanna look at memes maybe in that way, like memes are maybe the capacity to generate answers in the moment. Then you get a way better model. Still not sure if I buy in, but that sounds a lot better. No, I agree, that does sound a lot better. I mean, the way I, the easiest way I have to understand evolution, and I got this from The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Years ago, I read that book, great book. Matt Ridley’s wonderful, he’s interesting. He’s got a great interview with, Greg Ellis did an interview with Matt Ridley, he’s very good, recently. But my understanding of evolution, my simplified, oversimplified perhaps version, although I think it’s way more useful than some of these complicated versions, is evolution is the ordering that in essence, counters entropy. And if you just understand it in a simple fashion, a bunch of things just become instantly more clear. There’s more than one mechanism that the evolutionary theories, because evolution is not a theory, Darwinism is not a theory, right? It’s a set of theories, hypothesis, and ideas, which may or may not rise to the level of hypotheses or theories. And some of those theories may be wrong, and maybe most of those hypotheses are wrong, or could use correction. But there’s a set of things going on. And so to give Brett his due, maybe there’s a point at which we do take over evolution or are more involved in our evolution and less involved in our evolution. Fair enough, that’s possible. But I don’t think memes is it, because again, memes are so in the moment, right? They’re so not lasting. They are a way of expressing ideas. But they’ve come and gone, right? This method of expressing ideas is coming and gone. Expressing ideas doesn’t necessarily change the world in the way that people think it does, which is not to say that you can dispense with it and the world will still change. I don’t believe that. But I also don’t believe that any old idea with any old person is gonna cause any old change, or any specific change, or any non-specific change, right? It could just increase chaos, which we live in the world of chaos. I just think that’s what’s happening. That’s why I don’t buy the memes change things idea, because again, who’s creating the memes? We are, we’re selecting the memes. Memes are not selecting us. And if our selections are bad, the memes don’t stick. And you see this, a lot of people talk about this. Tim Poole was talking about this years ago. Carl Benjamin was talking about this years ago. A bunch of people were talking about this over the intervening period. If you divide the world in the left and right, use that political framing, which I don’t recommend, I hate political framing. You’ll notice the left can’t meme and the right can. That’s weird. Like why is there a whole section of people with a whole section of ideological beliefs unable to do the thing that the other set of humans can do? Well, there’s something to that. And I think that something to that is what are you pointing at? What is your communication pointing at? You can point your communication randomly and then it loses meaning. Right? The memes don’t meme. They don’t work because there’s no meaning. There’s no coherence. There’s no understanding. There’s no intelligibility. And then you need that. But there are other ways to get meaning, coherence, intelligibility, understanding. There are other ways to do that. And I would argue they’re all better than memes, which is not to say do away with memes tomorrow or anything like that. But it is to say that if memes are a problem, they’re not by any means our biggest problem. In so far that they are a problem, they are probably creating chaos where we could do with a lot less chaos. Yeah, so if you look at memes as a way of generating actions, because I think that should be our measure, right? Like the fact that we can act inside in the world because I don’t know what they mean. So in order to have the capacity to generate an action, there’s many roads I can use to get there. And then I have many ways of representing that action back into the world. Right, like I can connect it to a word, I can connect it to many ways of communicating. But let’s just use the word example. So now what does the word mean? Like does the word mean my action or does the word mean something separate from my action? That’s like, well, I don’t know what it can mean something separate from my action, right? Because that’s the only grounding that I have in some sense. And everything else is imagined. So if we start thinking of ourselves in that way, like we’re trying to reflect in a higher realm, right? Like in an imaginal realm, the things that we use to do, and then we try to find alignment with other people that are trying to do the same so that we can cooperate, then what is the function of a mean? Well, the function of a mean isn’t a reliable expression in the world. What it is, it’s the functionality that the mean has in the communication that I’m trying to have with the other individual, right? So the mean is like a temporary variable that gets created in order for me to, in order to allow me to have participation with another entity. And I think that’s the function of a mean. And I think if you start looking at that way, right? Like you can say, well, yeah, like sometimes there’s a repeated nature to this, right? So there’s a value there, but yeah, I think the whole dynamic changes if you start looking at it like that. Yeah, for me, that goes back to realm of transformative coupling, right? There’s a coupling that’s supposed to happen and means don’t do that well. Not say they don’t do it at all, right? But they don’t do it well, and they don’t couple things that are permanent, we’ll say. And so this goes back to, well, what’s the purpose of language or communication or signaling as such, right? Is there’s a way in which if the signaling is descriptive or the language is descriptive, you’re talking about a participation, right? And then if you’re talking about participation that you had, in other words, the language is serving the participation, then it’s good, it’s good language, right? Even if the participation is bad, because you can say, look, I did this thing and it didn’t work out, and this is what I did, right? You describe it, it’s like, oh, okay, well, that’s good information to have. Like, okay, I understand your signals that it ended poorly, and maybe it will end poorly for me if I do it that way. Yeah, fair enough, right? And, or you compare it success, right? Like Richard Branson wrote a bunch of books on how he was successful. Now, I’m not Richard Branson. I can’t do what he did and be successful because I don’t have his skills, but it’s useful to see how he was successful and what worked for him and what didn’t and why he thinks it worked for him, whether that’s accurate or not. Like I could argue that, well, he wrote this, but I don’t think that’s why he was successful. He was successful because this is in this, right? You can go back and forth with that. That’s the postmodern critique, but it’s not useful, right? Because you can do that forever. Like there’s no moving forward. There’s no moving in a good direction, still moving, right? You’re not moving in a good direction. And if the language is meant to cause a participation, but not serve a participation, that’s when you have a problem. That’s manipulation, right? That’s where the line of manipulation is. And I think memes are, you know, they don’t serve one purpose. Like some of them are funny. They’re meant to frame break. They’re meant to usually frame break other people, not you, which I think is interesting, right? This is sort of an indication that maybe, maybe memes aren’t meant for you, right? Maybe they’re just a manipulation technique that may or may not work on you and on others. Or maybe they’re a signaling technique sometimes that signals which group you’re in. Are you in the group that believes in equality or diversity? Or are you in the group that thinks both circumstances are absurd? And the answer is neither, right? Like there’s a third condition, right? Because there’s all that signaling there, whether you realize it or not. The world’s not made up of dichotomies. So you can understand these things. If the language or communication serves a future participation and that participation is good, then you’re in good shape. And I think memes could in theory serve that purpose. But I think in order to serve that purpose, you really wanna go back to Jungian collective unconscious, right? You wanna go back to a shared imaginal realm throughout time. It’s much bigger than the number of people available today to think, right? We’ll go back to, we’ll invoke distributed cognition. Distributed cognition must have happened throughout time. And therefore the smartest books in the world or the oldest books in the world, they’re all wisdom tradition books, roughly speaking, right? Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, right? The Confucian texts, right? It’s all there, right? There’s a bunch of them, right? The Tao Te Ching, right? All of those are really old and there’s a ton of others. But they have different abilities, different capabilities, different cultural contexts that allow you to understand them either better or worse, right? All of that is there, inherent in these things. And they serve to offer you a way of participation in the world. And that way is through this distributed cognition, communication throughout time from some of the smartest people ever, right? They’re full of flaws because distributed cognition is not a perfect good because nothing’s a perfect good. But generally you wanna go with that because it’s worked throughout time for most people that have engaged with it. And that’s a good thing. So it depends on what’s being served. If the participation is being served in the future towards the good, then it’s good language. It’s good communication. It’s good messaging, it’s good signals. But if not, if it’s designed to enact something in the world that maybe can’t be enacted, I don’t know, probably the person doing it doesn’t know. Obviously when people say equality and then they say diversity, they don’t know what they’re talking about, clearly. They’re just stating ridiculous contradictions that can’t coexist. It’s like, well, which is it, right? What are you talking about at that point? They don’t know this. They’re not aware of it, they’re still doing it. So the language is moving them. It’s not moving participation. It’s trying to manipulate participation into something that can’t be participated in. Can’t participate in equal diversity. That doesn’t make any sense, right? It’s either equality or diversity or some other option, which I think there’s a better option, but they don’t. And that’s a problem. So what is this participation, what’s being served? Is participation in the good being served or are you trying to force participation through the communication? Or is the communication about successful or unsuccessful participation? There’s three modes there. Yeah, so I wanna reframe it a little bit because I think we’ve been talking about memes. And I think, well, I know that we’ve talked about memes, but the memes, they live in the shared space, right? Like they’re an intersubjective phenomena, right? Because they’re related to communication, right? Because else they wouldn’t have any evolutionary value. They couldn’t be communicated between individuals. Exactly. So the problem is when something is shared, it’s not yours. So you can’t take action on it. Right. I just think it’s literally incapable. Like it doesn’t mean that you can’t make your own action be informed by the meme, but there is a translatory aspect where you have to participate with the communication in a way to make it work. There’s an influence there, not a control, but an influence component. Right. And then the other thing is that there’s the sense that the memes are getting a reliable response. So people seem to think for whatever reason that memes get a reliable response, right? And now we get into this manipulation space that you’re talking about, which is really dangerous, right? So you could say that, like, I guess this isn’t even true, but like if I punch you in the stomach, like I get a reliable response, right? Well, maybe if I punch you in the stomach with a sword, I get a reliable response. But now I’m imposing upon you in a way and that imposition is me trying to exert control. Exactly. And I think the control thing is evolutionary not reliable because now, first of all, like, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, right? Right. But there’s also something wrong there, right? It’s, I guess it’s discounting free will. Yes. That totally makes sense. Okay, there we go. That was my bugger me. Yeah, and translation, like, and the fact that we have different perspectives, like it discounts a bunch of things, right? In order for us to communicate, there’s still this understanding that is different, even though we’re using the same words. And this, we run into this all the time, right? We run into this all the time as people constantly, we’re explaining things to people and we use the same explanation we’ve used a thousand times with a thousand other people and it always worked until it’s one person and then they don’t get it. And there’s translation involved, there’s interpretation involved, there’s all kinds of elements involved in the way of that process. That’s why control is unreliable. Yeah, so I think I got it, right? So, because we were talking about consciousness of things and I think that aspect is really important because what is a smart person, right? Like a smart person is someone who has conscious awareness of or understanding of something that’s being acted out in the world, right? So now if we don’t have free will, right? Like, so we have a reactive nature to these memes because like the only way that we don’t have a reactive nature is if we have consciousness of it and I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s a mistake. But if we assume that frame, right? Like then the transcendence by lifting it up into consciousness is actually the way that we start reprogramming reality. And I think now I figured out where he’s wrong, okay. Yeah. So. No, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah, and I think, you know, look, I mean, I think we could probably go on forever but I think that’s actually a good place to kind of land the plane, right? Is to understand that point that there’s translation, there’s interpretation, there’s framing, there’s perspective, right? These are all for independent variables. You’re not getting rid of any of them. You’re not solving for any of them. And that manipulates communication. And so the communication has to be towards the good participation. It can’t just be good communication as such. It has to be pointed towards something good. And that is a hard problem to solve. That is the problem that gets struggled with in religion. That’s the goal of religion is to solve the hard problem of goodness, right? It’s to solve ethics and morality. We have a video on ethics and morality. If you haven’t seen it, it’s wonderful, right? It’s old. I think it was our first talk actually, right? Yeah, I’m working that out. It’s hard and people need to take it seriously because it’s not easy. And we’re just kind of told, oh, you’re an ethical person by design or the Rousseauian model. It’s like Rousseau is full of garbage. He’s wrong. It’s obviously wrong too. Like it’s not a secret. Take 10 seconds to think about it. It’s like, yeah, Rousseau’s wrong. That’s dumb. It’s clearly not true. Two-year-olds are violent. What the heck? We’re not born pure. The blank slate theory is a bunch of nonsense. It’s clearly nonsense. It couldn’t possibly be true. Just we’re born. And again, Sam Harris is due. We’re born. We had no choice about being babies. We had no choice about loss of agency when you’re a baby and gaining agency as you grow up and the implications of where and how you grow up, influencing you and creating you, literally, right? Building you into the person you’re in and the fact that you’re subject to that happened to you with or without your knowledge or approval because you were a baby. You had no choice. You certainly didn’t have as much free will when you were a baby as you do now, but you certainly have more free will now, right? And more agency as you grow up. And maybe that’ll change a little and you can even alter. It was terrifying, but it looks that way, right? And you have to acknowledge all of that. This isn’t a one-shot story. We’re the snapshot in the middle. And memes are a snapshot in the middle in time. And they’re trying to capture something that is moving and that entropy is real, right? And entropy applies to memes. And so we wanna hold onto it nostalgically, right? To that time period when we had an understanding of the world that was maybe cool, right? We watched the office and how we understand office politics. It’s like, no, you saw a snapshot in time, something that you resonated with, whether or not that was a full picture or even an accurate partial picture. I never liked the show personally. I thought it was terrible. Well, the British version was good, but the American version was garbage as usual. It’s not accurate, right? And no place worked like that because you can’t work like that. But there were things to resonate with it for sure. But all that has changed. And now the modern conception of the office is something like Severance, which is terrifying, terrifying show, terrifying. I like it, but it’s terrifying that there are people that view the world like that. And that’s the interesting thing. It’s good to use the memeplex. Search the memeplex, as I say, like you can search Google images or a Canva, right? For individual words, you’ll find the memeplex. You’ll find the zeitgeist. You’re searching the zeitgeist when you’re doing that. Not completely, but it gives you an idea. It’s terrifying to see because you can see what spirits are unfolding, right? What is the memeplex projecting? That’s what’s unfolding. It’s not causing those things. It’s showing those things. So what do you think, Manuel? That’s how I view memes and the memeplex. What do you think to round it out? Yeah, so I’m trying to recontactualize. And I think the lesson that I’m taking from this is we relate to the world in the moment, right? So when we wanna have a relationship, we should build that relationship in the moment with the tools we have and all of these things. And then if we start looking at memes as these blimps, right, in time, right? Like these one-time manifestations instead of these things that persist through time and that we can hang our hat on, I think we can have a healthy relationship with these things, right? But if we’re trying to abstract them and to containerize them in any way, right? Like to exhibit control, then what we’re doing is reclosing of potential. And I think maybe that’s the way that memes are also trying to control other people is by implicitly closing a subset of potential for them. And yeah, we should just avoid that, right? Like we should be our own authors, right? Like we talked about communication and in every communication, there’s a role for you in that, right? If you’re receiving it. In the reception, there’s a responsibility to revivify it, like you give it your own participation and create something unique, right? Like you’re not trying to copy paste, copy pasta, right? You’re not trying to copy paste something that someone else is presenting to you. And like I’ve seen people do that, right? Like I read this and then they start pressing that point but it’s not your point, like it’s not yours. Right, you don’t own it. Yeah, don’t pretend it is yours, like own it first and then start making your point. So yeah, that’s what I got out of it. No, that’s great. Yeah, participating in conversation is about curation and ownership and wrestling with ideas as Jordan Peterson talks about. And I think that, yeah, I think that’s really why I don’t like memes, why I don’t participate particularly well in the memeplex, although I’ve been responsible for one or two memes myself. I have a meta meme, right? I do not think that meme means what you think it means with the philosopheraptor, because who doesn’t like philosopheraptor? Yeah, I think that that’s a good way to end it is to point that out, like your ownership of your ideas, take control of your agency, right? Clean your room as Peterson would say, right? Struggle with the ideas so that they’re yours and they’re not just controlling you, right? Don’t just give in to them. And maybe, you know, we can together point at the good. That would be good. Point up. Oh, great. That wasn’t mine. Thank you, Manuel. This is a great talk. See everybody.