Waves have a socalled hyper existence (*). This means that waves have the abilit
y
to emerge and reemerge over and over again in many different systems. It is as i
f
the wave lies latent in some heaven where all emergent properties live.
(corresponding to Plato's idea world) Now, recall the properties of a virus. It
floats about inactively until it suddenly and abruptly is activated by a passing
genome which it exploits to make a copy of itself.
Suppose that waves are viruses which float inactively around in the
world of emergent properties. It is just waiting for someone to splash in the
water or slow down in a car queue. The wave then gets a chance to reproduce
itself, a momentary possibility to control a system and exploit it to propagate
waves through the material world. The people in the car queue may not _want_ to
slow down and thereby propagate the wave, but the wave-virus nevertheless forces
the system to propagate itself.
The above should strike the reader as slightly problematic. We usually don't
think of waves as viruses, but rather as an innate property of physical systems
that satisfy certain universal conditions. In fact, we often find that
information spreads as waves in social systems. Why then should we describe such
wave properties in cultures with viruses when they are equally well described
with e.g. waves? (more precisely: holographic projection) In this way we avoid
the subtle Platonic dualism which Memetics suffers from.
(*) Emergent properties and their hyper existence are thoroughly described in my
article "Back to Basics" which may be obtained on my homepage:
Onar.