I am particularly attracted to the idea of the "fractal", which is a scale-independent repetition of a theme. Nature seems to "discover" a few patterns then use them in endless patterns and variations. This is one of the building blocks of what is taking shape as a "theory of mind". To build a "super mind", it would make sense to design the largest scale of this mind in the cloud to tap the computational power of millions of volunteer machines (as in the cloud project to classify galaxies). However, perhaps this as already been done. At least to serve in my "thought experiment", Google may be enough. The "theme" that has me fascinated is the mapping of one brain state into another, using something similar to the Shrodinger Wave Equation. That equation describes the state of the universe in the "next instant" as a function of the state of the universe in the "previous instant". The mental equivalent would be...

You can think of a "meme" as an shared "big idea".  The main thing about a meme is that it is shared between minds (2) - the more minds the better. The idea is that memes compete with each other and survive at the expense of their "hosts", who are "infected" with memes, such as (Dawkins' favorite example), religion. Late in life, Dawkins still pushes this idea and it still gains some traction. There is an attractive analogy between genes and memes, spelled out explicitly when Dawkins introduced the idea [1] and swallowed up by "Surfaces and Essences" as just another example of analogy making -- perhaps one that doesn't get to the "essence" of the phenomenon of "ideas". In this blog, I will use the word "meme" sparingly to refer to basic powerful ideas such as the "Self", "Reality" and "God". It turns out that we don't get very far by thinking of these ideas as ...