The demons are metaphors for memes. However there aren’t any functional agenty meme free humans. A human with a demon won’t try to remove it. Your fear of demons is just a fear of anything that changes your utility function. But if you are the demon, you won’t want to go. Memes can change your utility function. From the point of view of a human with memes, you want to keep them.
That’s close to what I was getting at, but not exactly. The analogy is more like: The fact that demons exist and can enter human ears = the fact that humans are susceptible to tribal memeplexes; particular warring factions of demons = particular warring tribal memeplexes. So not any meme is a demon; e.g. the meme “Your keys are still in your pocket, Daniel” isn’t. This makes sense because that meme isn’t… power-hungry or manipulative like tribal memeplexes are.
The story concludes by hinting that everyone or almost everyone already has demons within them, mostly invisible. And yeah, the real-life equivalents of these demons evolved because they increased our fitness. So it’s not obvious that we should resist them now, or at least not all of them. But nevertheless I think we should, at least when we are doing epistemology.
The demons are metaphors for memes. However there aren’t any functional agenty meme free humans. A human with a demon won’t try to remove it. Your fear of demons is just a fear of anything that changes your utility function. But if you are the demon, you won’t want to go. Memes can change your utility function. From the point of view of a human with memes, you want to keep them.
That’s close to what I was getting at, but not exactly. The analogy is more like: The fact that demons exist and can enter human ears = the fact that humans are susceptible to tribal memeplexes; particular warring factions of demons = particular warring tribal memeplexes. So not any meme is a demon; e.g. the meme “Your keys are still in your pocket, Daniel” isn’t. This makes sense because that meme isn’t… power-hungry or manipulative like tribal memeplexes are.
The story concludes by hinting that everyone or almost everyone already has demons within them, mostly invisible. And yeah, the real-life equivalents of these demons evolved because they increased our fitness. So it’s not obvious that we should resist them now, or at least not all of them. But nevertheless I think we should, at least when we are doing epistemology.