How was culture formed?

Distribution of information.

Giving frameworks for information storage and dissemination?

Indeed, both are true, and originally it was structured much like DNA.

People develop habits for the most efficient way of living and pass that on to their children. Inheritance, institutions, traditions. A sort of blind process really, and mostly still blind.

Everyone familiar with cybernetics? It’s the understanding of regulatory systems. Our culture regulates us. It’s a cybernetic construct, and like many such material examples of this, its life processes are largely vegetative. It seeks self preservation but is little prepared to adapt to conditions changing around it.

What’s the attraction of Second Life?

Community. Don’t we have that in real life?

Real life has limitations. What limitations does Second Life lack?

Disability.

We have reproduced a great many of the social bodies and behaviours in Second Life that we have in real life. Why is that?

Matter competing for the same spaces.

Familiarity.

It’s our only way of communicating? Exactly, but perhaps the attraction of Second Life is that it allows for more dynamic redesign. Flexibility of perception.

We can make our imaginations come to life.

We aren’t as absolutely subject to social selective pressures, like natural selection, because that social selection has been eased. In some few pockets in Second Life, even largely removed. We experience a different state of being, a different sense of personal identity.

What is this life we live in Second Life other than an eversion of our inner lives. A communication and thus socialization of our primary informational or conscious natures? Eversion can be read as extroversion perhaps. Can we create in any other way?

An idea in my head goes out into the world. Can it be taken out of the personal context in any way? Like the artist who is heavily invested emotionally, intellectually, conceptually in their work. Can the art be divorced from the artist? Can you have art without an artist?

We can’t touch (i.e. think about) information without impacting/altering it.

Or perhaps another question. What is the difference between human conception and conceptualization? The difference between human reproduction and signal retention? Do we reproduce to add completely new information?

Our children are a way of passing on our knowledge and values. Passing on our memory and physical legacy so even after passing we are “still doing our part.”

Well, here in Second Life something even stranger than just creative expression is taking place. We get to treat peoples minds as environment, imagination as nation. People powerfully identify here as furries or goreans or fairies or dragons. It’s a long list. Are they really not these things? And if not why not?

It’s a great way to meet like minded people.

I believe you can see a person’s true self here.

Biological information by itself cannot account for psychological information, and is person a personality or a body? Mind or flesh? Information or carbon? A thinker or a glass of water?

Mind is how they impact us.

In real life, a combination of the two, but Second Life is great that you can leave the limitations of your physical body behind.

It would seem even in nature that material and biological forms exist primarily to support and convey information as behaviour as well as material. The frog has to keep eating the fly. We recognize behaviour first. They have even proven more or less that we have a hard time even evaluating someone’s physical attractiveness. It’s apparently a rather fuzzy thing. Instead, we judge them based on what their body language makes us think they are.

I have found my appreciation of facial structures has changed as I have aged. No amount of good genetics makes scowling look sexy.

Though to someone who had a strict mother, it might be. Well, here we have an entirely new way to communicate. One that hugely engages our old information channels but leaves the specifics up to us. Strict mothers still don’t produce people attracted to a hate filled face. Instead, they project a role that they associate with powerful sensation and their identity onto that person. They aren’t seen as sexy, but that isn’t seen as necessary.

Here in Second Life and all across the internet, we are able to get at the guts of culture, the DNA of consciousness, and what do you think? Does it behave like our old institutions do? Memetic evolution is possible here rather than strictly behavioural. Have the two proven to be smoothly compatible?

There are still some social limitations, like the fact that sim owners hold all the power no matter what artificial social structures they might try to create.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~