I find multiple-draft philosophy helpful in explaining human existence as memetic creatures. As always, I position philosophy as a practical philosophy, helping an ordinary person navigate his path across reality toward the absolute.

From standard puzzles to…

Should you be puzzled if you find yourself one day admiring the thoughts of Plato and another day those of Aristotle? One day of Hegel and the next day of Wittgenstein? One day of Einstein and the next day of Lee Smolin? One day of Obama and another of Trump?

Do these shifts of your admiration show weakness in your reasoning? Namely, how can you admire the thoughts of those who oppose the thoughts of another you admire? And when I say admire, I mean incorporating somebody else’s memes in your personal reasoning, personal memetic field.

There is no need to be puzzled. There is no inconsistency as long as you appreciate a multiverse of systems, not trying to find a common denominator of all thoughts, a reduction of thought. And as long (even worse), you don’t suppose that your thoughts are eligible to represent that common denominator.

Thoughts (memes) are parallel, not serial.

Your thoughts, concepts, and theories (if they are expressed) are, in principle, unable to be in any meta position (position outside itself) to any other. They are parallel. Socrates is parallel to Thomas Aquinas, Descartes is parallel to Newton, Maxwell is parallel to Marx, Darwin is parallel to Nietzsche, and Groucho Marx. The illusion that you can create a common denominator leads to eclecticism in one direction and to an illusion that, for instance, the Higgs boson is a kind of god particle that will allow a grand, unifying theory to emerge in another.

It is not hard to see the resemblance of this reasoning with the multiple draft scenario of Dan Dennett.

Memes and consciousness

As consciousness should (could) be perceived as an emerging multiple-draft property of human beings (here, I follow the notion that consciousness is a property of human beings and not of brains), memes are to be understood as an emerging property of evolution, building blocks of human consciousness.

That does not contradict their essence as replicators, using and abusing humans for their own interest/replication. They would not have emerged had there been no appropriate neural base, but, at the same time, the neural base would not have evolved as it did had it not been inhabited by meme viruses. Memes, thoughts, and consciousness … emerge as fields. However, fields exist only as long as they are plugged into an anti-entropy energy source. That is why we say that they ‘emerge.’

Returning to multiplicity, it is essential to remember that positions are not fixed in the memetic world. As defined by quantum mechanics, they are always in superposition.

Consistency is inconsistent

There is a hierarchy, but it changes with each election; only those elections occur much more frequently than those for the Parliament. The hierarchy is not consistent. Not only does consistency not rely on external reality, but it is also internally improbable. My internal memetic environment (field) changes as much as my environment changes. It is the sole function of any living organism and its subsystems down to the gene level (perhaps even lower) to sustain environmental changes. One cannot relate to a changing environment but to internal changes.

Only fools have the privilege of staying consistent. The rest of us live in the exact moment in multiple scenarios, interact with multiple stakeholders, and follow multiple, often conflicting, goals. We live bottom-up. The only top-down forces are heredity in genetics and tradition in memetics.

We are multiples searching for a path towards an Absolute.