What would an infectious mental illness look like? If software viruses infected "wetware" (brains) and evolved according to natural selection, what features would you expect them to exhibit? Are there real-world examples? What sort of immune responses might you expect?
Stepping away for a bit, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. Please boost if you're also interested.
When it infects mice, it suppresses their innate fear of cats, making them more likely to be eaten, so that the virus can infect cats. The cats shed the virus in their faeces, from where it infects mice, and the cycle begins again.
T. gondii infects humans who have regular contact with cats, and it changes our behaviour, making us more prone to risky and impulsive behaviour (among other things). The article above lists an array of other effects.
@Wen@hosford42
Stephenson's relying heavily on the ideas of neurosurgeon Julian Jaynes (see The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). Stephenson's scenario is flashier, but Jaynes is more plausible - he's basically treating things like consciousness itself as a form of software, proposing that we literally had a different form of consciousness in the past (a bicameral mind) that was supplanted - almost in the manner of a virus.
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