Imagination Fornication: How Ideas Have Sex

Let’s start with a quote from the brilliant Jason Silva: “We still imprint ourselves on each other, but today we mark our territory with ‘ideas’ and ‘influence.’ We use language not to charm each other into bed, but to capture a vote, a ‘like’ or a ‘follow.’ We orgasm in 140 characters.”

The world is made of language, and we live in the “condensations of our imaginations,” as Terence McKenna articulated. The amount at which that condensation drips into the world around us has been mediated by the lag time that lies within our flirtatious and creative use of linguistic seeds. These memes penetrate and spread through a womb of syntactical ovulation, gestating and birthing technological children, whom evolve and mature into cell phones, automobiles, airplanes and space stations.

The ability to write this sentence is directly affected by the environment in which these thoughts and ideas exist. A linguistic womb ovulates within my imagination, taking labored breaths between syntactical contractions. I push memetic constructions through my fingertips, birthing ideas into your mind.

If the environment of the petri dish dictates the health of cell replication, it’s apparent that the environment of our imagination is dictated by the language we use, and thoughts we have. An optimistic mental environment maintains ideal climate for meme gestation – imagination fornication.

Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is “ideas having sex with each other.” You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.