The mental virus: An idea worth having
If the human mind can be correctly characterized as a kind of computational system, it would not be unreasonable to ask whether it is possible that there exist the psychological analogues of computer viruses. A similar line of reasoning can be seen when Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme (1989)...
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| Format: | text |
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Animo Repository
2022
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| Online Access: | https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/6160 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236270654_The_Mental_Virus |
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| Institution: | De La Salle University |
| Summary: | If the human mind can be correctly characterized as a kind of computational system, it would not be unreasonable to ask whether it is possible that there exist the psychological analogues of computer viruses. A similar line of reasoning can be seen when Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme (1989) as the social-epistemological parallel of his ideas about genes as the primary agents of biological evolution, and he has talked about this in terms which consciously borrow from the language of the biology of viruses (e.g. infection, epidemiology, replicators). However, neither Dawkins nor other supporters of this idea explore the extension of this metaphor to cognitive psychology (as opposed to cultural evolution). This paper examines the scientific utility of the metaphor “mental virus” in psychology, and surveys phenomena which are possible token instances of this concept, such as schizophrenic delusions, supernormal stimuli, and archetypal narratives. Key to the hypothesized workings of the mental virus is analogical processes, and an exemplar computational model in the form of the LISA architecture is used to illustrate. |
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