Archaic Memes

From Memetics

Archaic memes

An archaic meme is a very old meme; so old in fact that human biology has shaped around this, and has become inbuilt. Hunger and fear are archaic memes: they are inbuilt abstraction systems, designed to elicit a response. But if we take the notion that memes shaped selection, we can allude to the notion that memes provide a utility to the organism. The organism which initially built in the response heuristic of the hunger meme had a competitive advantage, as the meme drove to consume.

This orthogonal path is a contrary path to the dichotomy posed by modern psychological institutions (are there or aren't there innate concepts?[1]). Reframe the question in terms of memetics and abstraction, and it starts to look like co-evolution.

There is, of course, a limit to this stress test: for example, fear; there is a limit of what fear is in terms of memes and what is mere reaction—for instance a jump shock is a reaction, where as deep set terror is more memetic.


Proto-Amoeba => proto senses => proto memes proto sense => proto abstraction

Proto memes simplify an abstracted ability, such as to "go towards" or "retreat from".