The Beleboke: A unit of meaning (a meme). Also an antidote
August 28, 2012
Within the Beleboke is an idea. A meme. Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' in his book The Selfish Gene, referring to the smallest unit of cultural meaning. A meme is a unit of meaning equivalent to the genetic meaning held in a gene.
Today, we use the term to refer to ideas that have moved rapidly through the internet. Some of those may be memes in the strict sense, but most of them are clever variations on a theme, more like a rhyme than a unit of raw meaning.
The Beleboke injects a meme in to the scientific paradigm. The rational and scientific is blended with the irrational and magical. To pursue the Beleboke is to insist that experience can be partially told but never fully defined. When we encounter the electromagnetic, we enter the fey, the magical. We re-program our body senses to accept a wider range of perception, a broader sense paradigm. If at first we need to borrow tools to transfer that experience over to something within our existing sensory limitations then so be it.
This is a pre-Victorian view of science, one where Keats writing poetry on the rooftop during an electrical storm provides as much insight as a lab experiment.
If we were to map the human physiology using electronic circuitry, then each of the sense would be a balance of Inductance and Impedance. For example, we impede an awareness of time to allow for a generally accepted linear chronology.
This is the meme: The Beleboke induces an ecstatic physiological response.