Is information alive? Memetics, show that information replicates, evolves and mutates.

using the idea of "replicates, evolves and mutates"...sure

And I must say, vice versa. You see a lot of atheist busting in on threads and attacking those who are theists, sometimes with violent and threatening words.

That was a pretty one sided video, not very objective

They can be a mindset(idea) that leads to people all having similar behavior.

I think those move faster than verbal maybe because I see more than I hear or read.

I saw him on a FOX news channel commercial before he ran for president and I told people on the forum I frequented then that he was going to be the next president (never saw or heard of him before in my life). He was also interviewed by Oprah before he ran (I think it was before) and she suggested he be president too. He started circulating as a presidential meme before he even ran.

I don't know if he has been mentioned yet so i apologise if this is a re-post but anyone interested in this kind of idea should look up one of the lesser known geniuses of our time who upon his death was hailed as "The Davinci of our time," Walter Russell. He had a similar idea, even going as far to say that even written information and the such can almost evolve as different people learn new information as they may all have different understandings of the same material.

That is very interesting. I don't watch television, so I was not aware of that.

So maybe these memes enter the culture like a dog walking into a crowded room from outside. But where is outside?
Who opens the door to them?

Interesting concept.

Information is terms of energy would follow the laws of thermodynamics, which could give the appearance of evolving
and replicating patterns. An ethereal data stream of information can also be altered via contact with other data streams. But to say that information is alive implies a biological process. Information is dynamic, but not alive.

in the same sense mother earth is alive and fire is alive(eats breathes shits an grows

but not conscious

It's generally accepted in memetics to treat them as if they were alive in theory because the behavioral patterns they seem to follow are that of an alive and conscious entity.

It leads to a better understanding of how they work. You are on track with thermodynamics angle as well.

ah yes conscious....idea of one

The marketers of social engineering.

Stuff and nonsense.

Are you working on an advanced degree in fashion?--because that is what a meme is.

"What is hip"?

I don't think anyone would argue with that, but we are talking about things that are beyond the scope of marketing.

Yes, even the current accepted definition of life was extremely difficult to put together and just because we don't think something is alive in our old fashioned criteria, doesn't mean it's not alive. Just think for a moment, imagine if humans were just hosts for these symbiotic/parasitic life forms we know as memes and thoughts. It's not easy to even begin thinking about because it is kinda scary, knowing that you're not really you but a mash up of various bits of information and how a lot of people's actions and behaviours stem from the thoughts in their minds.

You say biological process, but at the very core of every living being, we're programmed by DNA and what is DNA but tightly packed information? A blueprint for the body.

Most of this of course is just a thought experiment and it makes me wonder, did consciousness exist before life did? Information would have been responsible for creating the various galactic environments until eventually the right mix of energy, radiation and combination of elements gave rise to all we know around us on Earth...

The reason why books get burned/banned, websites get banned, movies, stories etc. Control information and you can control people. Just look at China. Controlling information in the age of information technology is more powerful than controlling weapons. So obviously there are powerful people who know more about the subject, even if their understanding is lacking, they use it to control people to some degree.

Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991).

Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced it.
[link to pespmc1.vub.ac.be]

I could be subliminal and that's how you heard that name in your head. It got in there somehow through passing (do you listen to radio?). Why on earth would I think this guy is going to be the president, it was the first thing that popped in my head when I saw him.

Youtube Derren Brown and you can see how easy it is to use suggestions to manipulate people. In one of his live shows he managed to manipulate the entire audience into doing exactly what he wanted, simply by using words and gestures.

Please explain how memes are "beyond the scope of marketing."

I think he meant that memes are more than just marketing as I posted just earlier.

"Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one."

Culture, belief systems, traditions, these are all memes.

Yes. We are talking about more than Madison Ave.

I do not listen to the radio. I do not read a newspaper. I am not interested in American politics or politicians. There is no reason why I, living in rural Western America, should be flooded in the middle of the night with thoughts about an unknown politician from Chicago.

Another person, from an Asian culture but in the US, had the same experience. She does not frequent Western media of any kind.

If we are going to think outside of the box, let's get out of the box to do it.

There may be other ways of transmitting or exchanging information that we are not yet aware of. There are intriguing studies on cellular communication in plants, for example. This would have been unheard of 20 years ago.

Birds, for example, can see in infrared and navigate by magnetic fields. Humans cannot do either one, cannot perceive either one.

Information is not energy. INformation is distinguishing something that is , and something that is different. In quantum entanglement that information travels instantaniously across the universe, imlpying to me it is in a higher dimension, and therefore our thoughts, consiousness is also in a higher dimension, forming a being - maybe god, that we are unaware of like the cells in our bodies form us and our consiouseness but are unaware of our higher thoughts.

I'm not the least bit educated on politics and I even wondered if a senator can be elected president, that's how clueless I was about it too.

There is no real definition of "alive" except the criteria I stated, being the most commonly accepted, the ability to replicate, mutate and evolve. Just like there is no real definition of information. Maybe your bias and preconceptions give you the impression that something has to be biological in nature to be considered alive. But for me, the commonly agreed upon definition of alive fits perfectly in with the concept of memetics.

When was the last time you experienced something truly "alien"? The little grey aliens from old sci fi movies and humanoid, x-files type aliens, are the least alien I can imagine. The idea of a bodiless being is not something new and I'm not saying information around us are/is alien beings but it does seem alive, does it not?

Look at what people are willing to do for beliefs and ideas, they are willing to die for it, to keep their beliefs and ideas going... Now the interesting question to ask is, how much influence does the information around us have on us, as individuals and as a collective whole. And us on it.

I also find it strange how the term just went viral all of a sudden, out of nowhere, seemingly overnight. It's very rare to know how or why something actually goes viral like that. How ideas and fads start, there has to be a "patient zero". I remember one day in highschool, I brought a yo-yo to school, just to pass the time waiting for the bus, next couple of days yo-yo's everywhere, so I have witnessed it firsthand but I still don't understand how or why it happens.

Dawkins? Jeez, you need to get out more.

Start with Saussure, then move to Barthes.

Stop re-inventing the wheel...

How is providing a little background info for people who know nothing about memetics, reinventing the wheel? If you know so much why don't you write something more meaningful?

I see memetics controlling people's actions everyday, influencing their thought patterns and behaviour. GLP is makes for a good observational tool for the spread of information and I'm not the only person to realize that. I'm sure that certain individuals and groups use this site to test how certain information spreads. Lies and insane beliefs run rampant on here and one can see what kind of effect it has on people and it's not a very good one... but they still spread, from person to person.

The last large meme I can think of that altered the behaviour of people was "planking" which is totally insane and stupid and yet thousands of people were infected with the meme and did it...

So how did it start? Who started it? Why did it spread so successfully? I think it's scary that such a seemingly tiny and innocent thing caused people to do such insane acts and some even managed to die from it. This meme overrode the body's imperative to survive! Memes can make people do insane things, it can change the way people behave and react, it's the closest thing to "magic" we'll ever experience.