to madness close allied

Chloe talked of memes...
I like memes.
I am of the opinion that everything we think and every thought we put into action is not whatever it is we think it is but part of a kind of thing that we have no word for yet, something like a life form, something that has evolved symbiotically with humanity. So I see a lot of the world rather differently to other people. This should mean I am mad. But unless I’m very mad indeed, beyond paranoia, so that my world is so illusory that I don’t notice the universal contradiction between all the sane people and myself, then I am actually fairly sane, and that’s how people treat me. This is maybe because the way I see the world doesn’t mean I behave any differently from the way I would if I saw all human thought and culture, each book and brick, camel saddle, large hadron collider, mosque, lipstick, as something generated ab initio by the human mind. To see all human culture, everything that has been in and out of the human brain at least once, as an evolved and evolving quasi- [definitely quasi-] life form doesn’t mean that I act any differently to the way I would if I saw it how everybody else sees it - which is something, to be honest, I’m not clear about. As “brain product”, perhaps.
James Lovelock makes clear that an apparently intelligent system which appears to have insight and motive, need have neither. He gives the example of a planet that through its evolved life forms mediates the radiation of its sun. The evolved life forms are two species of flower, one with white petals, one with black. If the sun heats the planet too much, the white flowers open and reflect the light back into space. As the planet cools, the white flowers begin to close and the black flowers to open, absorbing radiation and warming the planet. As the surface warms, the white flowers begin to open again and the black to close. And so on.
So my peculiar belief is this, that for tens of thousands of years in our evolutionary past homo sapiens had the brain capacity for what we do now.* But nothing happened. And how should it? Our brain capacity is uniquely equipped for vast and complex traditions of knowledge. But without those vast and complex systems of knowledge, how were we to think? Clearly, we thought more than just Uggg! But it was much nearer to Uggg! than to the way we think now. So nothing happened. And nothing went on happening for a long time. Then, relatively suddenly and quickly, something took place, in and crucially between two or more brains, and it began to evolve. Whatever it was, it existed in the world, as speech, as a painting, a recipe, but it could only reproduce and multiply in human brains. And it had dynamics of its own. That is why today little is subjectable to logic or reason. Did Ioannes Paulus PP. II Karol Wojtyla cure four-year-old Heron Badillo who was suffering from otherwise terminal leukaemia? One would think not. But this miracle is not only a testable fact, it is also a something else that we don’t yet quite have a word for, ceaselessly and mindlessly working, just as much as the avian flu virus is ceaselessly and mindlessly working, for its place in the world.
I suspect that this idea is so obvious and so like the way things are that, though now nobody looks at things this way, in a couple of generations everybody will, and will always have done.

*This bit is fairly orthodox. “To judge from brain size, the main reliable clue, the advanced cognitive capacity[in h. sap] preceded the first complex traditions by a few tens of thousands of years at least. Perhaps there was a final cognitive modernization not reflected in brain size under the influence of coevolution with complex traditions.” Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, University of California