The Revelations of an Elite Family Insider

[Twain Shakespeare]

Memes can be best understood in analogy with unicelluar life. In my perception, as a "dialectecal materialist" rather than a Cartesian "All is dead matter" naturalist, I do not see a single cell as an organism. Unicellular reproduction generally results in virtual clones, so a population of unicells is almost as genetically uniform as a multicellular one. These unicells communicate with each other by means of hormones and pheromes, and act as a unit.
Recent studies have shown deep similarities between the way natural language functions among groups and the way other natural systems function (such as a disease virus). Language systems behave as living organisms in the way they maintain homeostasis across their populations. The mechanism by which they transmit the information is the same way group perception is maintained, "chatter", like a cloud of pheromes, which constitutes the routine 90 % of communication. This living being, language, may itself have less awareness than a virus or a photon, or it may have a deeper structure. I have seen a few maps and models which might describe such, but I am literally agnostic about that question. What I am nearly 100% confident of, in terms of verifiable knowledge, is the lifelike behavior of language.

[Twain Shakespeare]

Language arose well before individual group consciousness became the norm. The ancestors originally thought by means of images. Image. or archtype dominated awareness prevailed for a long time after we started productively chattering and growing the base of routine universal code. Slowly, individuals bagan to actually use this language internally to think. When this state spread thruough the majority of the popluation, a quantum jump occured. A measure of the difference in mentality between verbal thinkers as they evolved, and surviving image dominated populations, is remembered in stories of soul-less elves, "who know not what they do, or why!" I suspect, such jumps occured time and again as language evolved and or linguistic consciousness devloped. I think some people today are "Philosophical zombies" or "skinnerian robots" and one such variety may be those who still think only in images, archetypes, and gut.
This is my third post tonite if you missed the one at the bottom of page two. I will continue.

[Twain Shakespeare]

From what I have read of the populations of Australia, and to a lesser extent, the Americas, such group onsciousness may have dominated until contact. But it also appears that such mimetic systems, once they have evolved, spread by contagion, transforming even populations that are not yet otherwise cuulturally, or possibly even psychologically adapted to it.
The phenomenae Jayne observed in his work on the bicameral mind was the emergence of the concept embodied in the pronoun "I", which he saw indicative of the emergence of individual consciousness, yet does not appear in the earlist books of Genesis or the entire Illiad. I suspect by this time the change was linguistic, and represented a focusing of individual consciousness so exstreme it made the memes of an individual more important than the group meme. Before this, in the Illiad and Odyssey, they speak of shame, which is something one feels in relation to others. After that, they speak of guilt, which follows one to the wastelands. The actual transition to verbal consciousness, much less its first emergence in some twinspeak, were, I suspect, much earlier.
continued...

[Twain Shakespeare]

What comes next? I am having a hard enough time time figuring out what is going on now. Writing and reading, which reconnects language to visual imagery, made for a powerful intensification of mental imagery. In my own personal experience, I started habitually running an internal dialogue only after I had learned to run one by visualizing imagery to accompany what I read, and words in my thoughts are, on a subliminal level that occasionally makes itself obvious, always accompanied by an image, even if that image is only the letters which spell it. Marshall McLuhan, whose account of historical psychology starts where Jaynes stops, said the printing press was caused by people reading more, rather than visa versa, and that each subsequent media invented revolutionized our thought processes and social relations.
To take any more about the future, I would have to change my analogy for the life-like qualities of language from the "emotional plague" model of Wilhelm Reich to the mimetic ecology theories of Robert Anton Wilson and others, and even then I would just be laying groundwork before I could make any meaningful predictions about the future. All that I can say for sure about the future is that the future is...
to be continued.