EDIT: also a biochemist in a previous life. If viruses are on the edge of alive, then books and posters might be too, in some sense. Virus's are "life" withou

EDIT: also a biochemist in a previous life. If viruses are on the edge of alive, then books and posters might be too, in some sense. Virus's are "life" without replication machinery. And what is a book but a similar sort of dormant form, without the fertile replication machinery of the [human] mind to remix it and help its ideas fuck with other ideas. This view of viruses and words as life perhaps isn't as wrong as it first sounds, and some linguists on the fringes argue that language is more like a semiotic symbiont that has "moved into" our biology, specifically our neural structures, like a creature moving into an ecological niche and modifying it to suit its purposes. Or as I prefer to think about it: maybe we're already cyborgs straddling structures of biology and semiotics. (See: The Leiden School of Language[1]). Maybe humans are just the first example of this language portion of our organism starting to venture cautiously outside of our biology, like astronauts exploring outside spaceship corpus ;) Reality might be pretty weird imho, and hard to see for what it truly is. [1]: https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA331&dq=leiden+theory+of+language&ots=s00R6AM5rI&sig=MPm-VJY0InUgJNIPpA-wED0yUnY#v=onepage&q=leiden%20theory%20of%20language&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=f...