Holy fucking shit, where does all this 'magical thinking' come from regarding memetics?
It's very simple:
Humans are biological machines. Relative to what we call 'nanotech,' we are what is called 'gigatech.' Our cells are complex chemical von Neumann machines, which (by definition) are machines that can create copies of themselves by first following instructions to build the copy, the last step being to copy the information (DNA).
Other than simple behaviors (suckling, pain avoidance, etc) and tendencies (violence prone, delayed gratification), nothing in the brain is delivered to it by genes. Being that we are physical, we depend on replacing the 'broken parts' within us with matter collected externally. Being physical, it means we must obey causality. This destroys the most liberal concepts of "free will" out there.
Everything you know came to you via external stimulus, or is the result of composing the external stimuli. Every opinion formed is formed on elements which were inserted into the psyche via physical processes. The brain must make sense of its stimulus, and since the brain itself cannot sense the world (it relies on signals from sense-organs), it's stuck having to construct a virtual reality in which to represent what it senses. Color vision is a very very basic example of what Meme Magick(tm) can do.
Meme Magick(tm) cannot occur anywhere in the universe except within the computational structures which create virtual realities for computational systems which are 'conscious' (so far only humans are *known* to qualify as this). Pepe drawn onto a stone that is then launched off the surface of Earth at 50,000 km/h will do absolutely nothing as far as affecting the universe. You cannot influence reality by praying, or drawing and then burning memes in fires. It requires not just a consciousness to be interacted with by the image, but it requires a consciousness which has internal psychological 'structures' that are compatible.
Just like you can't take a Windows program and drop it on a Mac (even though they're both Intel systems), because Windows is one computational (psychological) 'structure' and Mac is another, and the software was formed on account of the Windows structural elements (which means nothing to the Mac structure). Memes do not spread purely on their own in-vacuo. Just like a stream cannot 'flow' without the mountain to flow down, a meme cannot influence a mind that lacks the levers the meme pulls on for influence.
Meme Magick(tm) is so powerful, that it can change the way the world appears to a target mind. For millennia, the color blue was not named or mentioned in works until no more than 1,500 years ago. It is as if blue did not exist for people until someone noticed it, and it spread like a fire. This also explains how a liberal rioting in the streets near Berkeley thinks he's in the right. Nobody [almost] on the Left snickers about their evil rubbing their hands. They think they're right, because the memes they were exposed to up until that riot formed a mind which saw the evils of patriarchy and white identity.
Humans are biological computers, without souls, without free will, and without brain-state backups. Meme Magick(tm) is the phenomenon which occurs when a unit of thought is encountered by a compatible and susceptible mind.
