#meme

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#blind faith #discouraging #expedient #faith #inquiry

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#environment #exists #form #god #high

Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors. ↗

— Keith Henson

#behaviour #between #cult #detectors #induce

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

#death #life #meaning #mementos #ordinariness

But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next. ↗

— Christopher Nolan

#almost #before #cult #difficult #figure

When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent. ↗

— Joe Pantoliano

#fired #got #i #killed #memento

Maruman does not loll. ↗

— Isobelle Carmody

#accidental #cat #coincidence #funny #humor

If we take memetics seriously then the 'me' that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine. ↗

— Susan J. Blackmore

#me #memeplex #memetics #change

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#forgiveness

Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'. I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight. ↗

— Susan J. Blackmore

#design #foresight #memetics #design