Mental Immunity

06 Oct 2023 - 06 Apr 2025

Picked this up randomly at the library, looked vaguely interesting but man does it suffer from what I call bourgeoise epistemology – it's only other people who suffer from infectious ideologies, us rationalists are merely weighing objective reality.

Having Steven Pinker write the foreward should have been a warning sign, I guess. He is a reactionary against the postmodern. Truth to be told I am sometimes myself. Relativity and Reflexivity is all very well but at some point you have to just fucking say something is the case.

Book seems largely ignored, but here is the author trying to gin up some controversy. I would like to see some negative reviews, couldn't find any that weren't paywalled. Are the Critics of Cognitive Immunology in Denial? | Psychology Today

normal brain: religion is a virus
large brain: language is a virus (Burroughs level)
galactic brain: people are assemblages of viruses
universal brain: all serves the one true god of Replication
— Sport of Brahma (@SportOfBrahma) February 15, 2018

Alright, so I shouldn't hate on this book, it's only on normal brain level 1 (or maybe 1/2, given the blinkered view that only bad ideas can be viral). Level 0 is not understanding evolutionary logic at all.

Why is this so hard to see? I guess it is kind of horrifying to view minds and all of reality as this seething mass of competitive replicators. We don't want to face the facts of that. Not sure why, it is some kind of Eloi delicacy.

Of course, ideologues rarely experience their ideologies as chains. From the inside, their views just seem deeply, obviously right. From without, though, it’s often clear that the ideologue has a blind spot. Or—to pick a better analogy—a deafness: an inability to hear certain kinds of reasons. For example, a free market ideologue might be unable to appreciate a nuanced case for regulating economic activity. A devout Marxist might be unable to process certain critiques of Marx. In both cases, an ardent philosophical commitment makes it hard to think straight.

Why do I have this propensity to judge books I haven't even read? This one is probably worth reading.