Virtual Reality

Kate Distin.  The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment.  Cambridge University Press, 2005.  ISBN: 0521606276.

Reading Distin after Lotman and Uexkull drove home the idea that we all live in in two worlds.  One of these is almost completely outside our ken: we cannot see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, or even think about it really (except to think that it exists).  The other is knowable: we can see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and think it.  The first world is the "real" world.  The second world is a sensory projection (the human equivalent of the self-generated universe of Uexkull's tick).  The first world becomes intelligible to us only as our senses receive impressions that it projects into the second world, where we can feel them.

How does the mind fit into all of this?  It provides a holding place for sensory data, a kind of personal library where sensory impressions are recorded for consultation and comparison.  Over time, it accumulates enough information to help us "see" the second world coherently.  (Babies just experience stuff without knowing what they experience, while older children have an idea about what it is that they are experiencing, how it will respond to specific actions, etc.)  Distin describes this process as the acquisition of memes, which bind together in the mind to form a complete map of everything we experience (see, hear, touch, smell, taste, think).  These memes bind to one another into complexes (A goes with B goes with C, and so on) of information, creating a world-map we use to navigate through the virtual reality that our senses project.

All world-maps are "deficient" in some way, because none of them sees everything from every available point of view: this observable relativity is what makes it possible for us to realize that the first world, the world we cannot know, exists.  So no meme or meme-complex, no idea or ideology, is ever sufficient to tell anyone all he or she needs to know about reality, which is larger than the mind's ability to grasp (exceeding the capacity of the entire human sensory apparatus).  Confronted with infinite reality, our human world-maps are no more omniscient than that of Uexkull's tick.  The most we can ever do is conceive provisionally correct ideas: we cannot know all there is.