Information Loves Us, But…

…A report has recently been released that declares a certain law enforcement policy or program was initiated without a sufficient information-collecting apparatus in place. Years later, the program has no way of analyzing its own performance…

A report asking for more information.


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The speed of memetic iteration rendered genes impotent. The rate-of-change of genetic transmission, or more correctly the speed of its iteration cycles, is dependent on the reproduction of its organism-host.

Memetic iteration, in contrast, if it relies on the ‘speed’ of a periodicity of anything, is limited only by the physical limits of the brain (i.e. – the speed of neuronal transmission).

Now,

Though we capably understand that a micro-processor expands well beyond these limits, memetic transfer is subordinate, still, to something human.

Humans, as the organism-of-choice to deal the death knell to the gene, turned the transmission of information (if that is what unites genes and memes) into a non-physical thing. This is what allows its speed of iteration to perform beyond the previously absolute limits of the physical world, after all. Did life intend for humans to make its own info-propagating mechanism obsolete?

At this level of inquiry, can we ask instead – Did life intend to produce a form of itself that would render itself obsolete?

And then: Would humans intend to produce a form of themselves (the computer is a ‘brain’) that in turn makes them obsolete?

It seems, that in order for technology to continue its role as the accelerator of meme-propagation, it needs to rid of the us in it.


[Note: It seems that an assumption is being made here that the ‘technology’ meme is the paragon-analogue of the ‘human’ gene, what Susan Blackmore would call the advent of ‘temetics’.]

Susan Blackmore on memes and temes. TED2008. Filmed Feb 2008, Posted Jun 2008.
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

[Also note: Memes do not need life to propagate; the written word (if it can be separated from the subjective-reading human), for example, is not alive in any biological sense. The final question, not articulated very well above, is this: What world will supplant the non-physical mindspace of the human?]