M1: A Theory of Everything

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience".

This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals.

Mind Maps

One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informally model the "space" of ideas and say intelligible things about what ideas are "close to each other" in that space. This includes the ability to visualize the analogy, which, according to Hofstadter, is the underlying organizing principle of the mind.

Core Ideas

1. M1 builds on the first person experience. Everything we know comes from "unpacking" our experience, forming new associations into categories. This is articulated in Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". The first person experience is also primary in Zen, although Zen and Hofstadter arrive at quite different conclusions about what's "really going on".

1. M1 is ultimately about mind, mainly but not only human minds.
2. M1 builds on first person experience to describe (if not "explain") the emergence of personal memes such as "you" and "them".
3. M1 builds on personal memes to describe social memes and the emergence of "group minds" with "thoughts", "concepts" and "perceptions" that cannot be productively described in terms of some kind of function of individuals in the group (Dragon Theory)
4. M1 is about all possible ideas. Every idea that has ever appeared in all possible mind plus any idea that could appear in the mind, including "right" and "wrong" ideas. M1 is therefore a "Theory of Everything". Annoyingly to some, it includes all other possible "Theories of Everything". This "universe" of memes is sometimes called the "noosphere" but that word is also used in an mystical way to refer to the "mind of the universe". 
5. M1 includes the idea that M1 cannot embrace all of reality. This amounts to acceptance that there is a real world "out there" and our ideas map to that world only incompletely and approximately. Of course, since it includes all ideas, M1 also includes the opposite idea, which is that there is no actual real world out there: it's all in our heads (Strong Idealism). However, M1 concerns mainly with actual, productive and powerful human ideas. Acceptance of the existence of the external world allows M1 to embrace all of "Science".
6. M1 is not "epistemology" which is the philosophical discipline attempting to describe what "we" know and how we know it. How we "know" things is of specific interest in M1, including how and why we "know" things that are manifestly false or inconsistent with the other things we "know".
7. M1 collects imagination pumps (Dennett)
8. The focus of M1 is on "core" memes. These include the "Self", "Mind", "Reality", "Person", "Category" and of course "M1" itself and the meme of a "core meme". 
9. M1 is not reductionist. It makes no attempt to "explain" the universe in terms of a privileged "fundamental" collection of memes (such as those from neurology or quantum mechanics). If anything, the "self" is fundamental, yet, when examined, turns out to depend on other things going on that could be regarded as "more fundamental". 
10. M1 attempts to "unpack" the "self" meme to show the connection between the way cells specialize in brain tissues to produce a "brain" that is, at least in principle, capable of supporting a mind.
11. M1 is shamelessly self-referential and recursive. This is to be expected, since M1 is a product of the mind which has the remarkable ability to know itself and to know it is knowing or even doubt that it is knowing ...
12. M1 is to the universe of ideas as cartography is to the world. It's about mapping and exploring - specifically about tools we can develop to map the meme world - how we get from one meme to another, how we generalize and form analogies.

The Self and the "I Meme"

The "I" Meme is perhaps the most powerful meme of all: the inescapable impression that the world is experienced in the "first person singular". This seems to be "hard wired' in the brain and this meme finds expression in virtually all human languages, although to varying degrees (It is avoided in Japanese for example).

Attempts to discuss "I" from the "outside" result in a surprisingly varied collection of apparently related memes, such as the "soul", the "mind", the "spirit" and the "self". These are not identical memes and are each somewhat "weaker" than the I meme. We can, after all, experience the world in the first person without accepting the idea of the soul - in fact some schools of Buddhism explicitly deny the existence of the "self" as an illusion. On the other hand, it is common to regard "I" as separable from the body: the "soul".

Much philosophical sleight of hand relies on a constructed description of the first-person in terms of a "junior" meme for the purpose of denying that some other junior meme makes sense. For example, Dennett makes a great show of contrasting his view of the self as "what it feels like to be a brain" with his "straw man" construction of what people "must" mean by the "soul". All he succeeds in doing is convincing us that the Dennett "self" is probably incompatible with the "soul" meme, which doesn't actually prove that the Dennett "self" meme is a "thing". It turns out that the meme of the self-as-brain "explains" (at best) only what Dennett sets out to explain, leaving the vast experience of the first-person on the "cutting room floor".