So there's this Terry Pratchett book Men-at-Arms and in this Terry Pratchett book

Menat-Arms there is a disembodied idea of a gun and this disembodied idea

of a gun floats through space and then one day it lands on the disc world and the brain of the

Leonardo da Vinci stand in gets this idea stuck into his brain and he can't think of anything else but creating this thing he calls a god.

And so in that way I think maybe like these frameworks, there might be these ideas

floating around in conceptual space, the same way that there were genes floating around

before we had cell walls.

And I know this is not really clarifying it,

necessarily.

But the connection being that memes have a life of their own and technology seems to have a life of its own and ideas seem to have a life of their own where they outlasts their

containers. They outlasts the people who first think of them. And so there's a

very interesting like existential question is where do these things exist?

Like where do memes exist? We don't really know and that's something that Dawkins acknowledges

like he doesn't even understand.

Are they physical structures because they occur

within human brains?

Well, then maybe they can't occur on the page.

But it's a very complicated and kind of like philosophical question, I think.

And you know, in a way it's like, yeah, they're replicating for their own purpose and they're

replicating because they can replicate and for no other reason. And yeah.

Well, this kind of gets into this question that's been debated endlessly on the chance of can we force a meme?

Exactly, exactly, can you force a meme?

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