Transcription
Hello everyone, my name is Russell. Right? I'd like to welcome you to this web page. Probably you've arrived at the mimetics.com, and this is a special video that I'm creating to catch up with all of you.
Might have landed on this page because of my notoriety in business, and I'm a developer of software and the technology and marketing industry. Specifically, search engine marketing, latent semantic indexing algorithms, automatic backlinking and traffic systems, the Semantic Web. Along with my team, because I'm getting so much traffic overflow to this what some are calling very strange and bizarre page, I feel like it's important for me to provide some guidance and explanation to students who might be arriving and entering into an incompletely different dimension.
It's during this arrival on this page where you might expect the entrance of the theme tune, theme song to the Twilight Zone. You've entered a new dimension of time and space. As for this reason, because of the high profile that much of my work is getting, at least within my industry and some others, that I feel obligated to talk to you about EPPA mimetics so that you know why it was created and to communicate with you that it's merely and only a theory. And it started out of a joke between two software engineers, namely myself, Sue Bell, and other conversations I had after talking more about memes when memes first came on the market. When I say "came on the market," the idea of memes--I was talking about memes as far back as 2008 and 9. My children thought I was crazy about it, and now meme is a household name and of course has changed its meaning. And we also offer training on how to manipulate memes on the internet.
So being a futurist and a visionary, I can say that a lot of the times myself and my team are accurate in predicting cultural influences and, of course, the technology industry. The technology industry ultimately is a derivative of culture and vice versa. It's hard at this point to determine which one influences the other: is culture influenced by technology, is technology influenced by culture? It's almost like the same argument: does life imitate art, does art imitate life? And the answer is something that EPPA mimetics is all about.
Now, there are lots of conversations out there as to whether epigenetics or epogen are a real thing, in the same way that there's arguments about the validity of epigenetics. There, of course, will be arguments about the validity of EPPA mimetics as a meme. I find that all very ironic because both, both of them, both memes and EPPA memes are theoretical, and that's the entire point.
So first and foremost, EPPA mimetics is actually a meta-philosophy. Hardcore philosophers, perhaps even some of my friends and associates--you've created amazing works like the *Future Rica* trilogy, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderquist, and other brilliant minds of our time who are considered probably on the forefront of predicting the philosophical impact of technology on culture--may consider meta-philosophies to be marginally useful at best. But to be clear, I want you to understand why this philosophy was created and what a meta-philosophy is so that you understand what this madness is on this page. And it's actually not madness. You know, a few years back, much of the stuff that we taught in search engine optimization and technology optimization and Semantic Web predictions were considered madness. I doubt the meta-philosophy of EPPA mimetics is any less mad. It's probably equally, if not more, projected into the future. It's probably equally, if not more, a vision of things to come, a vision of the transformation of culture and the way we stack our philosophies and how it will influence culture and therefore ultimately technology. And it also could be utter bunk. And I first and foremost want to emphasize that all of my philosophies and ideas and concepts, every company that's ever I've ever built that's arisen or fallen, that's failed or succeeded, are all experiments. The universe itself could arguably be considered more or less a sequence of incredibly rapid experiments failing and succeeding over vast eons of time.
So first and foremost, the reason I created EPPA mimetics is during a workshop and during a sabbatical that I had on Kauai, in Kauai, Hawaii. I got very deeply into a philosophy and some of the works of Mark Evan Furman, neuro-printing, and a variety of other what I would consider to be neuro-theology topics. And neuro-theology is a kind of a buzzword for the combination of religion, spirituality, esotericism, and neuroscience. And I've got, again, everybody is over neuroscience, "Uncle Chur," but that doesn't make it wrong, and it doesn't make a lot of the concepts incredibly helpful when combined. I believe when combined with a variety of other disciplines, neuroscience has a place.
So I asked myself during this time: if I were to live my life backwards, what would I want to live for, my children? What would I want to leave for my children? What kind of ideas that I found have helped me? What I want to leave: a solid foundation, not just an argument, not just another self-help or skiing. And it was philosophy. Alexander Bard says it takes a good 40 or 50 years for a philosopher's work to move into the market. I'm not a real philosopher, I'm a mere meta-philosopher. I'm hoping that somebody will go and take this work and collaborate with it, because ownership is one of the very--ownership of ideas is one very thing as questioned. The foundation of ownership of ideas or memes or meta-memes is one of the founding questions of EPPA mimetics, experimental meta-philosophy.
So one of the things I wanted to leave for my children was a system of thought that would allow them to realize that memes or ideas are viruses. And it's not a position that people really like, least right now. I believe it's one that we will fully understand when we get to the bottom of mirror neurons. When we understand memes in the same way that Susan Blackmore has discussed them, I believe that ultimately ideas and entire idea plexus, and what we call "memeplexes," will be understood to be influential, influential neuro-nodal matrices of association that can quickly be ascertained, parsed, ascertained, and true ideas versus incorrect or the ideas will be able to be extracted from large masses of memeplexes. And the distinction between technology and neuroscience will start to become less and less as we move forward in time. This little image on the screen, from the genes all the way up to the unknown replicator--I left the unknown replicator and you do study replicators on the page below because we don't really know what the hell's going on, and nobody's been able to actually predict what my late, great friend Terence McKenna called the "alien artifact at the end of time," which was definitely not 2012, but it was a great idea, that was a great meme that got a lot of attention and chucked a lot of attention. We don't know where the human species is actually going completely, and I'm not going to claim to--it wasn't my intent for EPPA mimetics to have an arrogance behind it. It was an intent to leave behind much for my children and understanding that ideas can be as toxic and destructive to culture as a virus is to the body. I believe that's helpful information, first given to me in a book called *Viruses of the Mind* by James Brody, and I want to thank him for--ugly boots changes Brody--will look on the page here, see the Richard or James Brody. And that similarly excellent ideas, such as some of the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and other great mystics, saints, and engineers, scientists, quantum scientists--those same ideas create universes. And the challenge that I have is when I got out of the self-help--I'm going to look over here on this other screen here so that I can read something--and my friend Peter Moore, real very, very well. And this is also what I discovered after attending and analyzing literally thousands of self-help gurus, books, information technology, really get into the self-improvement industry, the self-help, not just merely the self-help, but the self-improvement world of business and online business because it took me a while to break through from, you know, "I need to believe in something" into "I need to believe in, execute specific stacks of logical sequences in order to become successful."
There's a lot of stuff out there that's really sounds a lot like self-help, like belief is all that you need, and that's why I joke around with the site here, EPPA mimetics, which may be gone by the time you see it: "Insert belief here." That is actually the title, because I began to realize that beliefs are numerous, and people and don't have necessarily a great way to validate beliefs because we're lost in the super--like a fish swimming in water, and we can't see the water. We are ideas, we are an idea, and we're swimming in a sea of ideas, and it's hard to determine right or wrong. So what you get is skepticism, and the whole skepticism universe has had an immense amount of positive things to offer to help children and even human beings involve themselves in critical thinking techniques and methods. And the problem with it is, most a lot of the skepticism and the skeptical--the works of *Skeptical Inquirer*, the works of Richard--ironically, there were two works of Richard Dawkins actually started my whole journey in the area of EPPA memes, in *The Selfish Gene* and the rest. They, these guys start to become a little bit full of what I call "pseudo-skepticism," meaning they've already ruled out anything that doesn't fit in their worldview. And what happens is that creates cognitive dissonance at a fundamental level of their unconscious mind, so that there are really--it becomes really, really difficult to determine when they are getting in their own way, and and then they become like much science, and even quantum physics is becoming at this point a kind of cult of rhetoric in which you really would be hard to find out if they are capable of having a new idea because they have decided that based on the momentum or the neuro-plasticity of their skepticism that just everything that doesn't fit within a certain, when a certain logical and neural pathway should be thrown out with the rest of the trash.
Now I agree that you should, you know, probably, if I throw a bowling ball into the air, that bowling ball is not going to hover, you know, to the moon. In other words, there's limits to faith. But the issue that I have with pseudo-skepticism is that we don't understand how ideas are stacked, and if we don't really understand the neuro-theology of belief, even even the Skeptical side, the so-called scientific side, a belief that the same traps that exist with the theologian, with the mystic, and with the with the radical believers that don't require any logic whatsoever--if we don't realize that the same pitfalls and trapdoors, mental trapdoors that occur within a fanatical religious sect, for instance, are potentials within the scientific and pseudo-skeptical community, what we have is just another extreme. So it's the same side of the same coin. And this is where I feel some of the neuroscience will help us, some of the quantum physics could help us. If we're so quick to throw out the works of amazing mental artists and physics artists such as Bill Tiller or any of the psychonauts and shaman that I've studied with throughout the world and including having taken doses of psilocybin myself, if we aren't at least willing to address the issues in regards to ideas and beliefs themselves, I call meta-beliefs, then we could become just as tyrannical with our left brain, which is a sort of inaccurate analogy as to how the brain works, left and right. But if we become polarized in one frame or the other, absolute skepticism or absolute belief, we are subjected to the same limits as any culture that has gone before us. I think this is covered brilliantly well in the *Future Rica* trilogy by my friend Alexander Bard, Jan Söderquist, and also in their predictions of the future of God and its relationship to the internet and their books on atheism.
So one of the things I'd like to say is my friend Peter Moore talked about something that happened to him at a Tony Robbins event. And he said, "At a Tony Robbins event, I learned something that I will never forget." There's a ton of useful information at Tony Robbins events, but this stands out as perhaps more than anything else: Tony was talking about the most successful people he ever met and what they had in common. These are people like Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, and other successful entrepreneurs playing the game at a much higher level, the money game. So the world's most successful business moguls to superstar athletes, Tony discovered that all that they all do one thing that is key consistently that the other 99 percent of humanity does do. These are the one--these are the choices that this one percent cultural creative cast does something that they have decided that they are responsible for the string of successes that they always experienced. And these success--the successful implementation of this big secret is what he discovered. This is Tony Robbins discovered that some of the greatest minds, athletes and successful people of our time have implemented and understand: here it is, they protect their minds daily. They protect their minds daily. Then they feed their minds things that allow them to understand how to protect their minds, not in a way that's a psychic immune system from everything, but they utilize their own discernment. In other words, these people, these successful people are extremely protective of their conscious and subconscious minds, and they do everything they can to keep their mindset top-notch and always alert, not just a positive outlook. Okay, here's the thing: that they're intelligent, inquisitive people that question both polarities, extreme extreme skepticism all the way to the pseudo-skepticism, to extreme belief all the way to jumping off of a bridge and hoping it will fly to prove that you believe in God. Okay. In other words, some of the most intelligent and powerful people of our time have an immense psychic immune system and a self and self-discernment that allows them to ascertain and maintain ascertain what is true for them and not, and move forward even though the rest of the world around them tells them but nothing like this can be accomplished. In other words, they are iconoclasts. Okay. So the main thing that's that Peter's trying to say is be careful what you let into your mind because what you think about, what you think about, starts and begins everything. It's a beginning point for everything. You will always act based on what thoughts come first. And the scary thing is our mind is always being bombarded with thoughts and ideas from the outside world. This is really what EPPA mimetics is about. EPPA mimetics is about helping you to realize that ideas are alive, and in the same way *The Selfish Gene* discusses the gene as being literally a virus designed to pass on our genetic information, not necessarily a bad thing, it just has a viral tendency, in the same way memes do. As we talk about viral marketing, our ways for ideas to get passed on, and sometimes the ideas that get passed on and impregnate culture and become a disease in culture. In other words, they're not values or ideas that you necessarily want to embrace. And because memes or technology memes--what you're talking about right here on the rep of the third replicator--because they are such a significant--because technology has become so widespread with social media, it's incredibly difficult. You have to have a conscious act of staying focused and of managing your attention. And part of that conscious act as being aware that memes are alive and not underestimating the power of ideas, that ideas can infect your mind like a disease can infect your body. And this is not a fear-based philosophy; it's just stating the fact. I don't go--in the same way that I don't go around worried about where there a disease is going to infect me, because that fear probably reduces my immune system response anyways. There's a lot of evidence in this in this area. The University of Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York's done amazing tests, University of Ithaca on the immune system response to belief, and there's a lot of other work being done on this. My point is that we now live in an environment where the very things that our memes have created, our ideas have created, technology--the technologies themselves are now becoming self-replicating. They now can spread on their own. Okay, self-replicating nanotubes, Yull's little robots that self-replicate, we have all kinds--we're going to higher and higher levels of self-replication and artificial intelligence. And the key here is social media as a part of the movement of ideas through vast networks with almost no awareness of how incredibly powerful these technologies are to ruin our lives, change our lives, transform lives. One of the famous stories is of Justine Sacco in the book by Jon Ronson called *So You've Been Publicly Shamed*, as the name of the book. This woman literally did a single tweet, and on the way to from her from United States to South Africa, by the time she had to arrive in South Africa, this tweet had gone around the world three times. She lost her job; there was a violent crowd waiting for her at the airport in South Africa, in Johannesburg, and she'd lost everything that was true to her, and the entire world thought she was a racist by one single tweet. And if a tweet is an idea being passed through a technology or meme, okay, that's the kind of world that we live in. And EPPA mimetics is a philosophy, that's experimental philosophy that's in an act of evolution, is being--it's evolving. We must appreciate the power of ideas and technologies to completely change our world with a single tweet, say, "Go push the button," by not understanding and appreciating, respecting the sheer power of the dynamic that we now have, but the stacking of genes, memes, teams, and multiple other memes. Honestly, I believe culture has got real challenges. EPPA memes--the difference between an FMEA and a meme in this proposed philosophy is that EPPA mimetics disciplines--they are principles, not facts. They are principles, not facts. This is an idea that I learned from one of my dear friends in the world of sacred geometry, a protégé of Buckminster Fuller. Principles can be true across multiple dimensions and vectors, okay? They are scalar, whereas ideas not so much. An idea in one discipline might really like two plus two might make sense in the world of math, but it may not make sense in the world of spherical calculus. Two plus two might actually be a negative four in certain instances, the fact, there is a math equation that very strangely 2+2 is not. Okay. So the challenge that we have is understanding three-dimensional vectors, multi-dimensional physics, and to recognize the truth is not copyrightable, and that memes change and flex. Now that we need to understand that distinction between an idea and truth in one dimension and truth in all dimensions, vectors versus points, and that we're going to be moving in a time and space with information becomes part of that challenge, becomes part of that problem, becomes part of culture. And that what I want to leave behind for my children is the understanding that we have to protect our minds. It's becoming more and more difficult for people to be present, and I see people hanging out with family that they barely get to see anyways and tweeting and twittering. My girlfriend and I were at a at an Italian place, and we saw an entire family, a wife, a husband, and three children, all on their iPhones, and they didn't say a word to each other the entire time, and they were all using their technology memes, their their team, and they were no longer having a relationship in real time, and they were sitting at the same table. Very strange, but part of it, and it's not judgment, it's just part of the cultural evolution from genes invaded by memes, technology memes, where the technology becomes more important than your genetic heritage. This is going to be a challenge because the massive shift of values and beliefs and meta-beliefs, and I believe that bringing conscious acts of cultural creation to this awareness by understanding how these things will connect, understanding that we need to partake in becoming consciously aware--Bill Tiller calls "conscious acts of creation"--we really need to become aware of how cultural Howard genes and how our neural plasticity, the very fragile neuroplastic aspects of our cultural cells are being imprinted by technology. And that's really what EPPA mimetics is about.
So I've heard people at my conferences say, "Well, I've read your stuff; it's so incredibly far out there." Here's one thing to be clear: what's so cool about ethics is none of these ideas are my own. It's a lifelong project. This is not like, "Oh, when's your book on EPPA mimetics going to come out?" This is me taking David--David Furman's work and realizing that if I would live my life backwards, what would I want to leave? I would want to leave--I would want, at least my children and my generation to know that I made it out to make some clarity out of what some consider to be madness; that attention and energy and the purpose of my life was worked on, and that at least an hour a week I consciously contribute to my big hundred-thousand-foot-view project, the big life project. David Allen called it a hundred-thousand-foot view in *Getting Things Done*, and it's true; it's not really about action management, it's not really even about energy management, as Peter Vu talks about; it's actually about--it's actually about--it's not even about action or energy; it's actually about purpose management. And the management of purpose in your life really requires that you live backwards. So I would encourage all be watching us to take one big project in your life, one that you know you can't complete, and just start it and and begin and say, "Bye--hey, by the time if I'm glad I'm 70, if EPPA mimetics is finally a philosophy that's been clearly thought out and the collaborative philosophy is worked out, and the things that are not true about it that didn't stick." Remember, we have to be careful that truth is not by any means a requirement for a meme to propagate. That's the problem with memes is that they don't--we are not required to be a means or principles that are true on multiple dimensions. So one of the things I would just encourage you to do is just think about your big idea. EPPA mimetics is my biggest one. I could create a philosophy that maybe gains a foothold in culture and maybe a couple of million or people or a billion people and more know about it and it's gotten some kind of, and at least I don't want to say at the end of my life that I didn't try to provide a unique perspective and new philosophy and new meta-philosophy, even to be proven wrong. And so this is my big project, and this is what EPPA mimetics is below you. And so one thing I would say in regards to that, as I'm going to read the current definition of EPPA mimetics, I'm going to read it, so what is--here's the abstract, and this abstract is something that's going to be an entire lifetime work in progress because I have multiple businesses, because I'm an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, because I have these things, it's something that is in constant reach, fine, then fail faster, succeed filth--a person has to succeed right now, and the only one working on this project, and you know, so this is where we stand. First of all, EPPA mimetics is both an intentional--let me go ahead and put it here, let's go ahead and look at this: EPPA mimetics is an intentional systems theory and meta-theory of social evolution that predicts the existence of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and sixth cultural replicator. The axiom of EPPA mimetics theory is derived from multidisciplinary conclusions about mathematical recursion or recursive indebtedness. And please do understand that I have a lifelong involvement with some of my mentors, proto-geisha, Buckminster Fuller, on the concept of recursive embeddedness, and I believe that it holds a key, and this is when something I would like to leave behind with my for my children. It's also probably a significant, plays a significant role in hard artificial intelligence. So recursive about embeddedness as it relates to emergence theory and Robert Lanza's biocentric universe theory. This is just a theory, okay? It may or may not be true. The meta-theory of EPPA mimetics was first proposed by me, that of EPPA mimetics LLC, and was approved as a default domain in Freebase, blah blah blah. With EPPA mimetics theory, the fourth replicators are predicted to evolve sometime after Susan Blackmore's third replicators called memes or technology memes. Okay, fourth replicators are ever memes. See Susan Blackmore TED Talks, memes, teams, 2011. She's really the one who started these ideas. Let me go ahead and just shrink this back in here. The replicator is a concept first theorized by Richard Dawkins in his highly controversial book *The Selfish Gene*.
Gene as a meta-theory, Appomattox proposes a stack epistemology, as adjusted by George and Whiteside in his groundbreaking TED talk on simplicity vs. emergence theory. In this context, Appomattox itself emerged as a meta-theory that predicts the existence of a human culture that has evolved to a higher-order lateral capacity. Ok, and that's my hope, just to hope though. Additional benefits could be increased emotional intelligence, global increases in cultural creativity, and biological coherence, which is an entirely other topic. Epidemic theory suggests that such coherent signs could occur as the fourth replicator, images out of Susan Blackmore's third. The timing and extent of this cultural emergence is undefined, as it may be largely dependent upon the outcome of mankind's relationship with artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and/or technology, as per this thesis. Okay, so hopefully this gives you a little bit of an idea; it's a fun lifelong philosophy. Okay.
And when I talk about this, we're really looking at the ideas that will fit in the fourth replicator principles. Right now, in quantum physics, we are only beginning to understand the double-slit experiment and the fact that particles and waves behave oddly in relationship to each other and perception. I personally believe—it's a prediction, and it could be wrong, and I'm willing to be wrong—that perception will very likely be entangled, be discovered to be entangled quantumly with the sub-quantum universe. And what we mean by that is that when quantum physics begins to understand the strange behavior—even laser-polarized, you know, even the attempts to use lasers to finally crack the code of this double-slit experiment—it's very likely that we will see that the brain itself, the observer, is deeply involved in the pre-experimental sub-continent. Go into the way the brain works, the mind works, and the neural matrix works in order to fully grasp the holographic universe and/or the way that particle and wave seem to contradict each other at the sub-quantum levels of observation in the lab.
And so really, it was with that that I decided that to leave behind something for my children that if I wasn't able to take it very far, perhaps some of these young brilliant minds, using perhaps the work of Bill Tiller, if it hasn't been proven true or just true by the time that my life is coming to a retirement phase, then some of these other young talented minds will be would take these questions on. Because first, we must agree that they are important questions, and then second, we must begin to understand how to look at these questions differently. And so obviously, most of you who've either purchased my products or run my software know that I'm a big thinker; always have been. Perhaps this project will dry up and die out, and perhaps not. Perhaps, like many philosophers after my passing or later in my life, I'm hoping somebody with a better mind and a more clear understanding of philosophy and perhaps even some better ideas will begin to enter into this philosophy and, you know, keep the good stuff, get rid of the bad stuff, and maybe say, "Hey, there were some good ideas in this philosophy." So welcome to Echo Mimetics, the meta-philosophy. And remember, guard your mind every day.
As technology gets more rapidly connected to your cell phones, we will be constantly in an attempt of machines to invade your mind and to give you all kinds of ideas. It's up to you to consciously turn things off, take back control of your time, and build your business. If I didn't get hours of quiet and solitude every day without turning off social media, there is no way I could be building multi-million dollar businesses. And that's what I really want my children to know is you've got to turn it off sometimes because every time it's on, the machines—by the time you're watching this, maybe decades down the road—machines will have been so well-programmed because I know I'm involved in this kind of programming that they will jack every ounce of attention. As Alexander Bard and John Sutter, Chris called it, attention-ism is the new currency online. And though the people, I predict the people who can actually take their time back and create privacy and turn things off and not be influenced by digital names, teams, social media accounts, distractions, latent semantic advertising, and all kinds of other mind-jacking devices will be extremely rare people that can take control, protect their mind. These great individuals that, like Tony Robbins, talking about all the billionaires in the world who can think for themselves, I think it's going to become very rare that people have that kind of discipline and attention. Further, I think probably if things get too bad and the distraction gets too intense, it will have to be a required course in colleges and universities on how to take back your time and focus on your inner energy and focus on who you are and stay inspired from within yourself. And that's if I'm successful with Appomattox. One thing just to teach you that means can be just as toxic as a poison can be in your food to your mind. If nothing else, it might be a long rail round to do that, create an entire philosophy to teach people how impressionable the mind is and how deeply it instructs and informs—were dissing forms—the soul. It might be a huge challenge, but if I can do that and it can gain a foothold in culture, but I would have been successful in helping you find out who you really are, live your life backwards, create the life of your dreams, and understand the distinction between a great visionary and somebody who just gets lost in the sea of bad ideas. Thank you.