Here’s an interesting premise. Posit that humans are just the reproductive organs of ideas, and our minds little more than tepid pools of chaotically interchanging notions. We might be hosts whose carefully formulated egos are nothing more than the emergent terrain of an ancient memetic battleground - one imagines long wars between fear and laziness for control of our lizard brains. The memes with the most dominant survival characteristics must have long since evolved - likely candidates being caution, hope, and solidarity. In this paradigm, the most prolific ideas are the hardiest survivors of thousands of years of crossbreeding, their properties now the building blocks of more complicated and fragile abstractions like justice, ambition, and melancholy. The simplest ideas might occupy the lowest and most important rungs of an intellectual ecosystem, akin to our humble meat-space phytoplankton.
A question that then arises is how do ideas like self-