I recently visited a friend, game maker Alec Holowka, who introduced me to Dan Dennett. He was brought up for his book, Consciousness Explained. Here he talks about memes, but memes as parasites. They infect hosts, get them to spread the meme, and continue to live on.
The most interesting part of this talk was his reference to Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the past, we’ve unintentionally killed off civilizations by bringing to them our local germs. Today we’re doing it again, but with memes. The ideas of our culture have certain “germs” we’re accustomed to that if brought to a very different culture could threaten their livelihood.
Speaking of Tesla the other day, I now present to you a Drunk History of Nikola Tesla. This drunk story is reenacted by John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover.
Caution: there is brief vomiting.
I’m sharing this mostly because it’s a complementary idea to Kevin Kelly’s exploration of technology. Honestly, I don’t really like this talk. I’m usually pretty good at ignoring the delivery of a talk in favor of the content. But Susan Blackmore is just annoyingly pretentious. The idea of a teme seems a bit contrived, but I admit it’s interesting enough to think about. So it must have some merit.
