Hope you had a giggle. — Wallows

No one denies that survivable fertile offspring from inter-order hybridization is, if possible at all, very, very improbable and rare.

So, sorry there aren't more instances of evidence. — Michael Ossipoff

but some people think that memes spread because they are useful to the person or people that it exists in....this doesn't necessarily follow. — wax

Our normal view of ideas is also a normative view: it embodies a cannon or an ideal about which ideas we ought to accept or admire or approve of. In brief, we ought to accept the true and the beautiful. According to the normal view, the following are virtual tautologies -- trivial truths not worth the ink to write them down:

Idea X was believed by the people because X was deemed to true.

People approved of X because people found X to be beautiful.

These norms are not just dead obvious, they are constitutive: they set the rules whereby we think about ideas. We require explanations only when there are deviations from these norms. Nobody has to explain why a book purports to be full of true sentences, or why an artist might strive to make something beautiful -- it just "stands to reason." The constitutive status of these norms grounds the air of paradox in such aberrations as "The Metropolitan Museum of Banalities" or "The Encyclopedia of Falsehoods." What requires a special explanation in the normal view are the cases in which despite the truth of beauty of an idea it is not accepted, or despite its ugliness or falsehood it is:

The meme's-eye view purports to be an alternative to this normal perspective. What is tautological for it is:

Meme X spread among the people because X is a good replicator. — Dennett, pg. 363

As such, how can we say that life is any different than death? — simmerdown

I just don't get the "schizophrenic" obsession with people who can put on different personalities and entertain people. — Wallows

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.[1] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.[1] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.[2]

Rituals are a feature of all known human societies.[3] They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coming of age ceremony or rites, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, school "rush" traditions and graduations, club meetings, sporting events, Halloween parties, veterans parades, Christmas shopping and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia,[citation needed] are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and thus partly ritualistic in nature. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying "hello" may be termed rituals.

The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider's or "etic" category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or "emic" performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.[4]

In psychology, the term ritual is sometimes used in a technical sense for a repetitive behavior systematically used by a person to neutralize or prevent anxiety; it is a symptom of obsessive–compulsive disorder. — Wikipedia: Ritual

I don't follow any rituals nor do I encourage them because I actually don't know if God exists or not. — TheMadFool

Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons (rooms of books), showed credentials that were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the "treasures" destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or comma. — J.L. Borges, The Library of Babel

And then there will be no more humans whinging about the misery of existence. — Bitter Crank

In the same way people from India then to be less materialistic and more conformististic because they believe in the law of Karma. — pbxman

That is to say people from Buddhist countries tend to be more submissive and prone to change the inside than the outside. — pbxman

I don't agree. This seems like an unsubstantiated claim. — Tzeentch

you'd never know with certainty, but that's a truism about empirical claims period. — Terrapin Station

Are you positing a dramatic increase in testicle size and/or sperm production to account for this population growth? — Bloginton Blakely

Business is the action of creating and trading property usually for the purpose of generating an alleged surplus. — Bloginton Blakley

The needs of business created the large human population we have. — Bloginton Blakley

I don't eat or sleep properly - I haven't eaten all day until just now, for instance - I have terrible memory, and I often act like a sociopath or someone with Asperger's. There are some basic day-to-day stuff that I've just stopped doing, which leads to problems. I'm not communicating with people in my life as I'm expected to. I'm barely coping. All of this is causing big problems for me. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with me. It's obviously something, even if it doesn't have a name like you get with a mental disorder. Some of this sociopath stuff fits. I got my job through superficial charm, and I use it on customers, but the people I work with have clocked on that I'm a robot, and they expect me to be like them all of the time and not stand there being unsociable, which is difficult and draining. My job requires me to be an actor on different levels almost at all times.

But there's always a bright side, I suppose. This pizza I'm eating right now tastes good. — S

And, as mentioned in the synopsis, I made my little attempt at such categorisation and am curious to know if the result of my attempt, the list, could make sense to other people since it perfectly makes sense to me. — Eseitch

What about if we can't make a clean cut between good and bad, presuming that they're both caused by a single biochemical? — TheMadFool

Is our sense of meaning and value in a meaningless world/universe as much of an illusion as something induced by this "cream? Like if you have a pill that would give you a sense of meaning in your life, how is that different from if you invent a meaning to your life when there isn't any external meaning at all? Where is the illusion of meaning and where is the actual meaning? — Christoffer