Meme is still waiting for its language

I just looked up in dictionary to reassure myself that my understanding of “Meme” is not much different from that of a “standard” one and found this definition; … “(biology) a cultural unit (an idea, value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation)”…. Frankly, I am happy that Meme is non-genetic. If it was genetic, then perhaps we might have been calling it, “Memememe” and that is not a good looking word.  No, it is not me who thinks so but it is the “neuroscientists” who imply so. You may have read and heard several times that the brain inside our skulls is not actually a single brain but rather, it is 4 in 1; the reptilian brain, mammalian brain, Ape brain and Homo sapiens brain. That means, there is not a single “Me” but a “reptilian Me”, a Mammalian Me”, an “Ape Me” and a “Homo sapiens Me”.   

Though we have “Memememe” but our personalities are the product of meme, meaning the cultures we are exposed to. My intention here is not just to play with words but to say that memes that are responsible for giving us a sense of identity and personality is mostly “constructed reality”. No, I am not trying to imply that there is a war between the “constructed reality” and “natural reality” but instead that there is war within “constructed reality” and the main weapons is the “rationality”.

Well, it is good to rationalize things but anything out of moderation loses its originality. At least, the efforts to mathematize the language tell us so (The efforts to produce a logical language like that of mathematics based on symbols is now an example of classical failure in Philosophy). To me, the thinking that, math is the only rational way of expressing things is underestimating the complexity of reality especially the life. I am telling so because it has shattered one my childish dreams. From my early introductory (just out of curiosity) reading in Psychology, I found that there is a “subconscious mind” that the conscious mind remains mostly unaware of its “thinking” and one of the main “reasons” is our unfamiliarity to its language. It uses the language of the “symbols and images” and the verbal and numerical languages that we (conscious mind) understand are not of much use to communicate with this part of our minds. It is a fact that when we sleep, the conscious mind goes passive and unconscious mind becomes active and the unconscious mind communicates with us in form of dreams and usually they are strange and we do not know their meanings. Because we do not understand their meaning so we usually just discard them by ignoring them. The idea that a symbolic language would help us to communicate with unconscious mind was very thrilling for me. Modern arts somewhat were attracting me as I was “believing” that these seemingly “irrational” creations are influenced by “unconscious mind” and are windows for us to look into unconscious minds of their creators.

As I learned that computers have their own language that is very different than ours and we need an intermediary language to translate our language to the language that computers understand and likewise translate the language of computer to our language, so we could communicate with computers, made me even more hopeful. Perhaps, what we needed was an intermediary language.

With this thrilling idea in my head, I was looking for an intermediary language (How naïve) and when I learned about Bertrand Russell’s book, “Principia Mathematica”  and that it is a book about “symbolic logic”, I got really excited. It was not hard to find it. I was available at Provincial library. I started reading it very carefully but my hope was evaporated when I found out that it is neither an intermediary language nor a language for unconscious mind. In fact, it is not even a language for conscious mind (This is one of the reasons that I got allergic to mathematics and it is really taxing me high on my “intellectual” health). I know that I am the product of meme (Cultural unit however, I take it as me + me; Conscious me + Unconscious me) but actually this meme is me-me and still awaits for an intermediary language to make it meme.