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Overview:
The particular brand of consciousness enjoyed by humans is intimately bound up with what we know, what we recognize, and the kind of information we have access to. One way to understand information in the brain is via a Darwinian competition, with the information, ideas, words, skills, and techniques competing for access, vying to be copied from person to person. These are memes. With the right memes, you can skeptically assess your environment and act strategically in accordance with your long-term goals. With the wrong memes, you end up voting for Trump. Get your memes up.

lyrics

Lyrics

I kick flows for ya, deliver info for ya
Obstacles to thought, get rid of those for ya
How can a protozoa develop into a lawyer
Without any supernatural magic? Just let me show ya
Evolution, it's blind and kind of ruthless
It finds designs by trying different types of mutants
Mindless movements, randomly finding uses
As if the only way to get a rhyme to fit the music
Was to write a billion versions of a verse with tiny variations 
And play them back, to see what difference each difference is makin'
Stepwise exploration of design spaces
With a lot fewer ways to love it than hate it
We got a special kind of brain as Homo sapiens
Genetic variation is such a slow way to change it
Now that we can get infected and enculturated 
With memes, the pace of evolution is getting crazy

So get your memes up, try to read stuff
If you don’t read get a book on speaker
If you want to be a truth-seeker
Get some memes up in your cerebrum

Get your memes up, try to see stuff
If you can’t travel, get on Wikipedia
Get it from a teacher, or social media
Get your memes up if you want freedom

Ever since the beginning of multicellularity
Evolution tended to favour one of two strategies
Either anchor your body in place like clams and trees
Or navigate actively like salmon and geese
Humans and fleas, navigators 
Need to have a brain to chase prey and evade danger
A brain is a control centre, action taker
But it never was a generator of thoughts, that came later
When a certain animal evolved a certain talent
Recursive language, abstract words and grammar
The ability to turn inwards and sample 
The inner channel, which in turn turned it cinematic
You've been collecting memes since you were just a kid
That's how you can speak and know the date and do arithmetic
That's what recognition is, if your consciousness is rich
It's a list of memes that your brain has been infected with

So get your memes up, try to read stuff
If you don’t read get a book on speaker
If you want to be a truth-seeker
Get some memes up in your cerebrum

Get your memes up, try to see stuff
If you can’t travel, get on Wikipedia
Get it from a teacher, or social media
Get your memes up if you want freedom

Freedom from automatic action by any means!
Memes will set you free, but not just any memes
Beautiful memes give us true beliefs 
False beliefs take away freedom like skinny jeans
That's what it means to “know what your doin’"
With a ready explanation for any questioning human
A reason that's not a reason discovered by evolution
A reason represented in a mind, that's a new one
My daughter's three years old, she's given limited freedom
Citizenship is restricted when you're deficient in reason
But she's got a brain that's voracious for takin' memes in
So she's getting more and more conscious with every season
You can't do much work with your bare hands, love 
And your bare brain isn't equipped to understand much 
You can either live in a state of incomprehension
Or actively get your memes jacked up 

So get your memes up, try to read stuff
If you don’t read get a book on speaker
If you want to be a truth-seeker
Get some memes up in your cerebrum

Get your memes up, try to see stuff
If you can’t travel, get on Wikipedia
Get it from a teacher, or social media
Get your memes up if you want freedom

credits

from The Rap Guide to Consciousness, released April 20, 2018
(D. Brinkman, T. Caruana)
Produced and Mixed by Tom Caruana
Keys by Simon Kendall
Guitar by Tom Caruana and John Ellis

Further reading:
www.susanblackmore.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/JCS03.pdf
ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/MEMEMYTH.FIN.htm
bigthink.com/videos/daniel-dennett-memes-101

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Baba Brinkman New York, New York

Science rapper and inventor of several novel hip-hop variants. Canadian transplant to New York. Pathological optimist.

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