Ideas and Viruses: Information storage, transmission and replication in pseudo life forms
Viruses are fascinating because they blur the boundaries between life and death, they are self replicating yet considered to not be alive because they don’t have a metabolism. Viruses are also a lot like computer hackers, a computer hacker hijacks the host network for her own purposes while viruses hijack the cellular machinery of other organisms to replicate themselves.
An idea is a perspective on reality. Ideas are a lot like viruses without us humans they wouldn’t exist. They replicate by hopping from person to person and eventually from culture to culture. Like viruses and living organisms ideas change over time (mutation) and ideas that are no longer relevant cease to exist (natural selection).
Viruses can obviously get you killed, these are called pathogens. Symbiosis is a process where to living organisms benefit each other, its sort of like they’ve been in a really good relationship for millions of years. Our bodies are full of symbiotic relationships, I can’t name any symbiotic viruses off of the top of my head but I think a Quackle ( Duck Duck Go Search) would suffice your curiosity. With all that being said the point I’m trying to make is that bad ideas get you and your society killed whilst symbiotic ideas help you and your society flourish.
Unlike other life forms and viruses, ideas do not have a code. Or do they? All of life and viruses rely on DNA or RNA to store information. This information is essentially the blue print for the organism, biochemical information is miraculously preserved and subsequently translated into more complex biochemical systems which do the same thing all over again.
One could take an idea say, communism for example, and say that the code of the idea of communism is stored in the written or spoken word of communist. I don’t think this is where the information is actually stored, essentially I think the idea is encoded somewhere inside of the brains of people. It is imprinted somewhere in the neural network and takes on a biological structure. When a person relays information to another their brain undergo a similar process where it translates the sound into a bio-chemical structure residing inside the neural network known as our brain.
Now that I think of it the written/spoken word of an idea is information storage, its just not biological information storage. Reverse transcription is a process by which a cell takes RNA and transcripts it into DNA (its called reverse because it typically goes from DNA -> RNA). When we here words or read the communist manifesto our brains are transcribing/translating information into its biochemical form. When we speak or write this process is taking place in the reverse. Life’s all about information storage, preservation, translation and transmission. The real question I think we’ll never know the answer to is are we ever going to be able to pinpoint wether a person holds a certain set of ideas based on the structure of their neural network.
