the "Things replicating other things to be better off"
A kid sees the town blacksmith working and admires him...
Identifying the target
A kid sees the town blacksmith working and admires him. The blacksmith is charismatic, able to create weapons and has good traits as a person. The kid admires him and wants to be like him. These traits seem to put the blacksmith in a desirable position in life.
Another kid in a poor neighborhood sees the baddest gangster in town who has bitches and money. The gangster is powerful and has clearly done something right that got him there. The traits the gangster has seem to put him in a good place in life.
Animal finding a mate to reproduce with is looking for desirable traits. In a sense, the animal wants to replicate the mate’s DNA to produce offspring that has good odds to be placed in a good position in life.
Fusing into a single entity
13.7 billion years ago, as the hot, dense new universe cooled, quarks came together to form protons and neutrons, and these particles combined into nuclei. They wanted to fuse to be in a better position.
Throughout the years, the kid observes and imitates the behavior of the blacksmith. The actions are compressible patterns that are stored into the kid’s brain as new synapses. The fusion process was succesful and now the kid is stronger entity that can create weapons.
What if these phenomena of ‘imitating’, ‘fusing’, ‘replicating’, ‘combining’… are all analogous and originate from some very primitive atomic process?
Maybe we inherited this mechanism and now it lends its hand in our life, but we don’t think much about it? In the sense that, maybe we did not learn this thing, but it is a deeper property of atoms and it just manifests itself in our reality via actors that we are.
Maybe you imitating the funny thing your friend said, is in its original form something from our days as stardust.
Electrical signals in your brain are telling you to “replicate” the thing that helps you survive. It is the story of protons and neutrons fusing, but:
the kid’s brain is the domain
the actions of the blacksmith is the fusion target
these two are binded together via process of imitation.
The kid wants to combine with the blacksmith to be better off. Now he is stronger entity.
It’s a weird mechanism of things not doing their own thing but abusing this tool to essentially make copies of other things one way or another. Taking advantage of the other thing one way or another. Combining with it or its copy. Every living thing in our universe is doing this. Next time you are copying your friend’s homework, just think about how powerful tool that is you are about to use…