Love the site, haven't managed to read half of it, probably can't even keep up with the new stuff, You really should get more exposure, I could see you as a less 'voice of reason' Jezz Clarkson type or a less unstable Julie Birchil. I don't know what you'll make of the comparisons though.

My real reason for this mail, is to find out if your planning to cover the recent fuel protest thing, or it possible repeat in a few weeks. I believe and hope that you would take global warming seriously and not fall for the carbon industries spin.

At the moment the public perception seems to be that the low tax side is the side of the 'ordinary person' and the global warming concern is all coming from the establishment, middle class liberal types.

Surely the prospect of global warming must rate alongside population as one of the so serious, that if we don't sort it out we're fucked problems

Andy Morris

I like the idea of being a columnist or something of that sort. That would be fantastic, if I could get paid to be honest and say whatever I want.

I don't read the newspapers much at the moment so I suppose that would have to change. I don't know much about Julie Birchill, she seems very flaky and strange but I have to admit a strange fascination for her, rather like my strange attraction to Bjork, although Ms. Birchill looks like she has a bit more meat on her bones. I think that both women must remind me of my first girlfriend's older crazy sister. Ever since I have found a strange attraction to the borderline insane woman.

The fuel protests.

A bunch of self-serving populist rabble rousers. The story is full of contradiction. The price of fuel has slowly crept up over the years as taxes have been increased and nobody has reacted, demand is too high and inelastic. Then a sudden jolt in the price of the raw materials focuses everybody's attention on the matter. It is ludicrous to react to the increasing cost of fuel by reducing the tax on it. The way the tanker drivers folded before one man and a dog stank. During the miners strike much heavier picketing was ignored. The drivers and their bosses wanted to be picketed. All power to Tony Blair on this one. He is doing the right thing. Supplies of fuel are essential to keep the country going, socially and economically. I suggest sending a few hundred girl soldiers with PMT to keep the oil depots open.

I am not totally convinced by the climate change panic but it is blindingly obvious that increasing the percentage of CO ₂ in the atmosphere is going to have some effect and that effect is far more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Alternatives must be found.

I have long been in favour of working to get vehicles powered by either hydrogen or batteries. Obviously both of those require an initial energy source which should be greener. However as an interim measure even fuelling the process with oil or coal is better than waiting for a perfect system to come along. Once the infrastructure is in place for hydrogen or battery vehicles then over time the fossil fuel feedstocks could be replaced by something, or several somethings, that were more sustainable and had lower emissions, including CO ₂. I think the green movement needs to get its act together and start coming up with positive strategies.

As a salesman I am regularly asking people “how do you intend to pay?” It seems that most greens don't intend to pay. They don't want fossil fuels. They hate nuclear energy. Solar power and wind power farms are unsightly so they don't want them in their backyard. They damn all dams. This is not a tenable position, you cannot replace a power station fed by five train loads of coal a day by solar panels on your roof and a few windmills in isolated but ugly places that people don't want to visit.

Neither can you support a world population of six billion plus on hunter gathering or allotments. There must be big and potentially ugly plants built to harness renewable energy. The world needs vast amounts of energy to sustain the lifestyle we believe we deserve. I will not put up with cycling to work. I want a train. An electric commuter train. I have got one. The electricity that powers it should come from a more sustainable source. I also need electricity for my television, my oven, my microwave and my computer. I demand that, and I am willing to pay a reasonable price. If that means losing a river valley or estuary then so be it. Life is full of tough choices.

I am not a philistine with no understanding or love of beauty of nature but I do understand that everything needs to be paid for. The crazy attitude is to expect us to be able to stick a small hole in the Earth and get free and clean energy to come out with no downside.

Martin

About the illusion of self...

When I read Blackmores book I was thrilled by the insight into human behaviour it provided, especially human behaviour in groups. The conclusion she drew, that the self is an illusion and that happiness is to be found in the loss of self, struck me as defeatist psuedo Buddhist rubbish. You seem to of picked up on this aspect, and seem to be agreeing that that the self, will and self determination are an illusion.

To say that the self is an illusion, is like saying biology is an illusion, its all just chemistry, or that object oriented programs are an illusion its all just assembler. The self is a phenomenon that has emerged out of biology and memetics, yes it can be explained away in terms of memetics, but to understand people we have to include the idea of self in the picture. To allow the emerging self to realize its full potential we have to take our understanding of biology and memetics to let the self be in control of our precursive systems, not buffeted by them.

A great many of human problems are the result of people acting in ways which are dictated by the worlds of biology and memetics, to improve our lives we have to understand what we emerged from, learn to live with and control those aspects of ourselves and set the direction of our lives and our world to suit what we want. An old analogy says that people have three brains, a crocodile, a horse and a monkey, apparently these correspond with areas of the brain dealing with basic need such as hunger and sex, emotions such as fear and love and finally abstract thought and language. An update of these would add a software system with two layers, a chattering email system driven by manic robots and a emerging layer of meaning rising from the heaps of spam, corresponding to the whoever it is writing this.

You and me babe ain't nothing but mammals - no we've emerged from the memeplexes that colonised a species of mammals, we are only just starting to understand our origins, but in the excitement of that discovery we should not lose sight that we emerged from those origins to become something else.

Anyway keep up the good work, the site is a gem.

Thanks for the comments.

I too was instantly struck with the idea that The Meme Machine was full of defeatist pseudo Buddhist rubbish. At least as far as the conclusions and suggestions went. The first three quarters of the book were excellent. Giving good analysis and reasonable suggestions as to the nature of evolution of our brains. I read the chapter through again to see if I missed something, I could not see the logical jump between seeing memes as forming the self and the idea that the self should be freed from memes, it seemed a strange conclusion to draw.

I do not agree that memes were the principal cause of our brains. Memes filled our brains because it is in the nature of memes to do so, not that memes created the brains. Brains were created by social interaction among cunning and communicative apes. We got smarter to out smart each other. Memes rushed in to use the apparatus that had developed. A direct analogy; pornography did not create the Internet, or even Mosaic, but once Mosaic (the proto-browser) was in place pornography rushed in to use a media "that it was made for".

Yes the self is an illusion. If you have a problem with that it is probably because you define illusion in a very narrow way with a built-in suggestion that illusions are bad. The self is pretty much interchangeable with consciousness in my world view. Consciousness is a whole-brain phenomenon. I am unaware of any person ever who has had a stroke and been rendered unconscious but otherwise intact, like a sleepwalker. There is no seat of the consciousness, or the self, or the soul or the inner man. All these are the same thing, the whole brain's operating system. Perhaps using a word like illusion is wrong if I have a different definition of the word. It is an abstraction. The self is real in the way that society is real, Britain is real, the Windows desktop is real and socialism is real. That is, meaningful, but perhaps not quite as tangible and easily defined as something else, like a molecule, a Ferrari or Venus. I think we are agreeing on this point, so I think I will stop using the word illusion, and try to use abstraction instead. (Another re-write required, sigh).

I think you are right, we, the bits of our multi-dimensional existence that we regard as truly us, is a program running on hardware of an earlier system. We are living in mammals, but also of mammals. At present it is not possible to separate us from the hominid, and I doubt that it ever will become possible. Watching people fall asleep or degenerate with dementia shows the reality. That which we respond to most is the intelligent communicating entity not the animal form. But that intelligence is still very much an animal intelligence, not an abstract pure force like a soul. Deep inside me I am a shallow mammalian intelligence, my lusts and drives are primarily determined by bodily needs and the reproductive imperative. I seek to impress people with the clarity of thoughts, probably because I think it is a good strategy to get laid, or at least it appeals to urges that have evolved for those reasons.

We have emerged as a slightly different entity, at least some of us have, possibly only a minority. We have begun to exist on a slightly elevated level of intellect and to enjoy the flexing of the intellect the way a dancer can enjoy putting a body through a workout. Who knows where this may lead? It may begin to involve the fusing of artificial and biological intelligence to create a new raw form of intellect. Maybe. That is certainly a challenging possibility. It is also a more positive image than sitting around cross legged trying to think away the self.

Martin

Liked the article.

[Big Women]

I have a very similar take on the issue to you. Here's a couple of thoughts that might interest you. These are based on stereotypes not facts.

Why do we have women's food and men's food?

I work for a building society in Yorkshire, the canteen offers the usual 'chips and..' a veggie option, another hot meal and a salad bar. There's seems to be an unwritten rule that only men have pie and chips and only women have salad. The salad is always crap, no dressing, limp and tasteless.

Will Americans stop breeding?

The way America portrays itself and the way it is are becoming so different that they will die out.

From the images in TV and movies. you would believe that Americans are all fantastically attractive in a fairly uniform way, all men have six pack stomachs all women are smaller than size 12, all clever women have small pert breasts, all sexually active women have large hemi-spherical breasts.

In reality the majority of Americans are obese.

The variance presented to Americans will leave them unable to have an sexual desire towards anyone who may reciprocate, they will stop breeding, the last generation will live alone and use the internet one handed.

Good point. But it is not just in the USA, did you see the video to Toploader's Dancing in The Moonlight? Have you ever seen as telegenic a crowd as that? Everybody young, fit, attractive, slim and happy. Where were the blokes with short-cropped hair, ugly tattoos and beer bellies? Where were the skinny birds with spaniel's ears tits? Or the fat women with thighs that rub when they dance?

Like your latest style on the web site, the Black on grey text is very easy to read and with the blue Index panel looks the biz.

One grip is that it wont print preview properly and you have to right click --> print from the main panel to get the stuff you want. Any way great site, thanks.

Andy M

Print it! How dare you! Wait until the book comes out. ;-)

One way to print any website is to look up the source code, if you cut and paste that into a word processor you can use find and replace to strip out all the HTML tags. (Not there are a lot in mine). Alternatively if you have an HTML editor you can use that to change the colours to something that will print, how about changing the various blocks of colour into different fonts? It is probably what I will do if I ever get around to making the book of the site. I will have to use some pretty wacky fonts for some of the people who write in. I am glad you like the site and the way it is going.

Thanks for the reply,

my point about printing wasn't the colours but the way you can't print-preview it and that sometimes when you print you get the index panel not the text. Its not too much trouble to cut and paste into word or whatever.

I like to print some of the longer articles because I've never enjoyed reading long pieces of text off screen, also I like to read on the bog and in the bath.

Hope that doesn't put you off :-)

The site seems very fast today, this is the way all sites should be, the lack of those little 5 second waits that happen all the time elsewhere is wonderful, keep the faith, stick to text.

Thank you.

I can't remember when you first wrote in to me, and how much the site has changed. If you want to have a look at how the site used to appear try clicking the Meme Machine logo on the index page, it takes you to a page that shows a couple of screenshots of previous versions. What was I thinking about? And why did nobody tell me that the pages took a long time to load? Most people are too tactful, I like to tell it like I see it. This tendency can be a bit of a liability at work especially when people want me to tell them that the product they can afford is actually better than the one they can't, or that the brand they haven't heard of is actually better than the one they have heard of that costs half as much again.

As for reading on the bog that doesn't worry me, even thinking about where people have previously been reading library books before I borrow them. You find some very interesting things in library books.

Suggestions for printing for offline reading

[Response to No More Heroes]

Yes Hollywood and Rock'N'Roll glamorise anti social behaviour, its because stories about maverick heroes have a higher mimetic fitness than stories about (say) a hard working doctor who faithfully loves his fairly pretty wife, cares for his children, conscientiously does his best for his patients and sits thru endless local council meetings to improve the upkeep of local parks.

Good (mimetically fit) stories can be written about good (but not perfect) people in the ordinary world, buts its much harder. You will find it more in books than films.

To pick on rap or R'n'B music is a bit unfair, for a lot of black Americans, that is their reality. Its sells to white adolescents, but that's a mimetic jump, originally it was about people describing the world they live in.

Interesting points.

Have you ever wondered what R & B music is? Can you come up with a more accurate description than simply "The music that mainstream African American popular musicians make, or music closely copying this style" It seems a very nebulous category.

Who started the idea that everybody lives for music? I saw a poster today that said something like 'for whatever music you wake up for'. It seems you are free to be obsessed by whatever kind of music you choose, but you can't be normal unless you are obsessed by some kind of music. How absurd, just imagine it with sausages or ice cream, you chose the flavour but not the quantity you are expected to consume.

I don't have anything specifically against black music, I am against all artistic forms that glamorize criminality and violence. I have nothing against rap music that does not do this, but does anybody other than Will Smith make such a thing?

Connected with mimic, not connected with memes. (meme is not in my dictionary, shame!)

Memetic is a better word when discussing the fitness of the idea itself to be imitated, rather than the properties of the mimic.

As to the idea that it is hard to write good stories about good people I think you are being a little disingenuous. What about every John Wayne film ever made? OK, it wasn't the greatest literature but there was a moral element. And reasonable quality films can be made without having psychopaths as heroes, just think of most of the films Hugh Grant has appeared in. Chick flicks perhaps. I am trying to think of a modern action film with an admirable hero, it is very hard. Something like Crocodile Dundee is not too bad, but what is the most memorable (memetically fit) scene? "No mate, that's a knife." I remember seeing a heavily cut version of that film with most of the "bad language" removed but it kept in that scene, which was not essential for the plot, if I was in charge of that "family friendly edit" he would have continued to talk about food tasting like shit, but simply skipped the entire scene with the mugger.

I am not suggesting that there should be censorship of violent films but more people should have the courage to stand up and say that the moral lessons that are drawn from most adventure films are now dubious in the extreme and 95% of the audience of all those "shocking indictments of the horrors of war" go to enjoy seeing the violence, blood and gore, at least in part. The current position is that the filmmakers make whatever they want and anybody who says anything against it is howled down and told to shut up. It is almost as if we are all conspiring in the dismantling of all forces and factors of social cohesion. I want to censure, not censor, and I want others to have the courage to do the same. Freedom of expression is not a one way street.

Martin

Thanks for the reply.

Yes R'n'B is a very nebulous term, one way of looking at is black American music that hasn't (yet) been colonized by the mainstream music business and sold onto spoilt white americans. I've read your stuff about the over promotion of music and while I can agree with you if we are talking about the commercialisation, I do feel that music can be an incredible way of communication and understanding some of the stuff that goes on in our bodies and minds that we cannot express in text.

mimetic/memetic

I must learn to type better and not rely on the spell checker.

John Wayne ? I can't pretend that I've studied (or stayed awake thru any of) his films, but isn't he one of the prototypical 'hard men'. Also the way you can tell the badies by their ethnic origin must say something about his suitability as a role model. The term 'Chick flick' is interesting. I suppose a chick flick is a film about relationships rather than violence. I love chick flicks, seeing a good one is great, you come out with a new insight into people, inspired to love those close to you. The denigration implicit in the term Chick Flick exposes how fucked American culture is.

The whole 'relationship thing' is the reason why our brains are so big, you don't need intelligence to be a killing or fucking machine, you do need one to live with other people in a changeable world. My oldest fave Chick Flick must be Brief Encounter, a fantastically erotic film, yes they never get in each other's underwear, but when leaves him after their first meeting she is dripping with repressed desire. Another is The Piano. So much tension with the growing threat of violence, that when it erupts is truly terrifying, not so much for the physical expression, but the pain that underlies it. The color purple is another great one, and Frankie and Johnny. I love the way Al Puchino can do that stuff and still be so cool.

Your last point..

The current position is that the filmmakers make whatever they want and anybody who says anything against it is howled down and told to shut up. It is almost as if we are all conspiring in the dismantling of all forces and factors of social cohesion. I want to censure, not censor, and I want others to have the courage to do the same. Freedom of expression is not a one way street. is maybe connected with the rise of (especially Islamic) fundamentalism.

Stay with me a while...

There two strongest memplexes competing in the world are Global Capitalism and Fundamentalism.

Global Capitalism does quite well for a lot of people in the US and Europe, for the rest of the world it sucks, a lot of people are getting poorer and seeing their societies fall apart under the relentless pressure to compete. Global Capitalism seems to bring poverty, pollution pornography and drugs. Duty to society or family is mocked and steamrollered by consumerism.

Fundamentalism offers the only alternative to a lot of people, since the fall of the USSR, communism or socialism has lost its power to inspire. It had a LOT of faults but the basic idea was a moral one.

Global Capitalism, at its heart, removes moral responsibility from the individual and the state and leaves it to the market.

I am a father of two daughters. Thankfully we are quite well off and the girls are bright, I am sure they will find their way in the world and I will be proud of them. If I was an Asian father of limited means, living in a rough area, with girls of average wit, I think Islam could offer a protection from the world of teen pregnancies, unemployment and drugs. I might well prefer my girls to wear the Hajib(?) to becoming, what must seem like, a tart and mixing with, what must look like, layabouts and gangsters.

Sorry about the spelling and grammar, I'm envious of your articulateness, I hope these ideas interest you.

Andy M

Don't worry about the grammar or spelling, I can correct that when I publish this stuff, what I can't correct is dumb thoughtlessness, but I'll have a go. Not yours, but the widespread thoughtlessness that is the scourge of the age.

You have produced some good ideas here, which is what my site is all about. While I have put on my site a general disclaimer about reserving the right to publish all material I think it is better to make it explicit. I want to put this stuff in the Meme Mechanics, have a look at some of the material there and let me know how you would like it to appear, whether with a full name and email link or semi-anonymous. Several of the Meme Mechanics use a special email account to distance themselves from their semi-anonymous (i.e. first name only) persona.

Of course I will not publish this stuff if you don't want me to, but on the other hand if I can publish it I will probably make a better job of it, write more, write better.

Over to you.

Feel free to put anything I've written up on your site, you may refer to me as Andy Morris (my real name) and give my email as AndyMorris@Bigfoot.com.

If you want to rephrase stuff feel free, I am sure you won't try to change or twist the meaning. Let me know if you use it, I'll be chuffed to bits

Andy M