Autophagy or How Your Own Virtual Waste is Cannibalizing You.

As beautiful as the human brain is, it is also very vulnerable to information and the waste generated by it.

Our reality is mediated by filters no different from those provided by social media. The question then is: what lies beneath those filters?

"How men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles." [1]

“Impressions”

if John Lock was right, how then would we be reminded of aspects we have not previously witnessed?[2] Isn’t that the point of memes—to create, in a sense, a shared experience of “what happened,” even if only in impression? Memes generate “impressions” in our brain creating signals that are recalled when they are needed or not.

First, consider an example of low importance, SpongeBob's halftime performance at the 2024 Super Bowl. Consider your position before engaging with social media or any other unilateral form of communication, like TV. Was your initial position one asking SpongeBob to perform at the Super Bowl? Were you even aware that you wanted this? Now, consider your position- after interacting with such forms of communication, this is one of the effects of information proliferation.

This idea is echoed in Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan, where human minds are shown penetrable from within its deepest depths with Technology. Where Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio assembles a team for a heist film to steal someone’s old impression, by implanting a new one, his team is composed of dreamers of the invisible (i.e. analysts, architect, forgery as masterful recreation of the real, all around business). The team is able to implant ideas through the recreation of the real in the dream realm- which puts the subject in a share dream state witch resemble our own reality, a simulation of the real. When the subject wakes up, they are taken over by a different desire, a new symbolic order, implanted through technology.

The mechanism that allows for the proliferation of information—both receiving and sending—is an innate human ability. This ability undergoes a process of tuning based on the information it receives, as it needs equilibrium for our mind to create proper predictions. Plato already hinted at these innate human mechanisms, however, his mistake here is assuming that we have all the knowledge of the world:

"As the soul is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both in this world and in the other, it has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed. For as all nature is akin." [3]

We are bound by natural internal systems that constantly tune themselves to equilibrium, which, to us, appear as nothing other than living and existing. It is not that humans have all the knowledge in the world innately within them, but rather- humans possess all the systems in place to acquire all the knowledge of the world- it is important to note that not all knowledge can be acquire by our natural internal systems, this is the sole reason and purpose for humans creation of unnatural systems, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, humans transfer their ability into unnatural systems, which they control through their inputs for predictable outputs.