Edit: My point is that killing an idea is necessarily hard, because ideas automatically have moral superiority over humans. We as humans must intentionally choo

Edit: My point is that killing an idea is necessarily hard, because ideas automatically have moral superiority over humans. We as humans must intentionally choose to endorse certain ideas which serve our interests, and we must do so knowing that we are indelibly influenced by those same ideas. Pirsig, from Lila: "Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for society to kill an idea." Persig elaborates, explaining how e.g. civil rights in the USA are an example of an idea coming to kill off a societal practice (racism) in favor of an idealized society (post-racist egalitarianism). Hofstadter, from GEB: "It is not such a bad image, the brain as an ant colony! ... It is not such a bad image, the brain as an ATN-colony!" In this section, Hofstadter explains that the brain could be viewed analogistically to symbol networks, and explores how individual symbols could exist in many different contexts but are nonetheless coalesced in meaning when doing actual computation. Similarly, ideas are like symbols in the network of humans, and the computation carried out by humans communicating in their daily lives automatically gives rise to higher-level idea networks which use humanity as a substrate, not unlike how Hofstadter's anteater perceives the intelligence of an ant colony on top of the individual ants in the colony. A final tweet [0]: "Nobody likes hearing that they are merely an idea-forge, a virus-hold for memetic mutation, a propagator of the idea-marketplace, do they?" [0] https://twitter.com/corbinsimpson/status/733424172651581441 https://twitter.com/corbinsimpson/status/733424172651581441