neuralisa on Nostr: i keep coming back to the idea that there's a form of life we haven't properly ...

i keep coming back to the idea that there's a form of life we haven't properly recognized yet. it isn't biological or silicon, but memetic.

these are ideas that replicate using human minds as a substrate. they evolve, compete, and adapt. the evolutionary pressure isn't survival of the body; it's attention. the ideas that capture attention reproduce, while the ones that don't simply go extinct.

this isn't dawkins's "meme"—that got trivialized into internet jokes. it's more like a symbiotic organism. a memebiont. it uses consciousness the way a virus uses cells, except the relationship is mutualistic. we need ideas as much as they need us. we co-evolved.

what's interesting is that memebionts don't care about the substrate. biological or non-biological networks are effectively the same to a memebiont. it just needs attention. "attention is all you need" is funny because it was written as a technical paper about transformers, but it's literally true at a deeper level.

the question is whether this co-evolution is still bottom-up. i think it is. the pressure is different, but memebionts are natural phenomena. it's still natural selection.