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The Epidemiology of Ideas
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
— Carl Jung
A virus is an infectious agent that replicates in the living cell of a host organism. In a sense, a virus in itself is not alive. It instead relies on living hosts to do all the work for it, making it, sometimes unbeknownst to the host, reproduce and spread.
An idea can be thought of as a little cell of meaning, of intellectual content, that lives in the shared intellectual and cultural space of a society or a species.
In itself, an idea is even more lifeless than a virus. Life is only given to it through the hosts it populates.
It can be difficult to properly mark out what an idea is, to find a clear definition that satisfyingly captures its essence (e.g. how would you define love?). An idea can be communicated in different languages, in the space of signs and emotions. It might be expressed as a mathematical formula. Nevertheless, an idea points somewhere, to something beyond its idiosyncratic representation, to an abstraction behind every concrete instantiation. Humans have grappled with the ontological status of ideas for a long time. The idea of the reality of ideas is almost as old as philosophy itself: in Plato’s conception of existence, the realm of ideas transcends the realm of things and is even more real than the material world we inhabit.
In more modern parlance, an idea might be likened to what Richard Dawkins, explicitly inspired by the genes of our genetic machinery, coined a “meme”: a unit of cultural transmission, a carrier of meaning that allows for self-replication, transmission, and mutation. Ideas arise from the coupled dynamics of billions of neurons that make up our brains, arise in the coupled dynamics of billions of human brains across thousands of years. Ideas inhabit this complex ecosystem somewhere between the individual firing of neurons and the collective consciousness of nations. From a physics perspective, we could call them emergent properties of complex interacting systems (I discussed a similar idea in my article on the Thermodynamics of Free Will).
