Mind,
That was a reasonable post.
But I think in your conjecture you make some faulty assumptions and forget about alternatives to your senerios.
Example:
What is it that the virus doesn’t want you to discover?This may or may not be true.
In the last ten thousand years since first contact something remarkable has happened. Humans have developed skills that communicate, process, and store the virus with greater efficiency. First there was spoken language that allows us to organize our thoughts and name things. Then came written language that allowed us to pass our thoughts through time and space. The result of both of these is that the store of human memes and beliefs has virtually exploded.
And this:
As the memes thrived, we thrived. The parasite allowed us to develop technology and sciences that extended our lives and gave us material goods that made life worth living. We returned the favor for the virus by increasing the growth of the memes. When the Industrial Revolution came along though, we humans started to become a risk to ourselves and to the virus. We became capable of wholesale destruction that could bring down civilization and all the memes that made it up. Remember what I said earlier about what parasites do when their host is threatened with destruction?Do all viruses act to preserve the existence when danger threaten?
And you postulate that a virus knows it is threaten and knows it needs to act to preserve its existence.
I didn't know all viruses respond this way when threatened with destruction:
They reproduce massively.
So what will these memes do now?:
Do you think it is a coincidence that right after we developed nuclear weapons we entered into the Information Age? It was after we developed the tools to destroy ourselves that we developed the Information Superhighway and the global village that it created. In the late 1980’s there was a milestone. It was then that the total storage of knowledge contained in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Does this make this human memes or just memes? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts, and soon the new hosts will be computers that effectively foster reproduction of the virus much faster than humans ever dreamed possible.Are you implying the memes will switch hosts and leave the human brain and find space on some hard drives to survive?
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?