What is an idea? Is it some­thing that com­pels one to act? Is it influ­ence? Is it the atom of com­mu­ni­ca­tion? I would like to think that in each of these sen­tences is an idea, some pat­tern of thought that I can con­vey with lan­guage. If this is the case, what is this sequence of sen­tences? Is it a means of mak­ing you think what I’m think­ing? By tran­scrib­ing these words, am I guid­ing your thought? And what enables this guid­ance? Must I trans­late these ideas to writ­ten word to steer your mind, or might I speak them for the same effect? Might I sketch them out with lines and arcs with a char­coal pen­cil and in doing so ask you these same ques­tions? What is it I’m doing? How is it that by form­ing this prose I influ­ence the actions of your mind? How is it that I trans­mit this pat­tern of thought from my mind to yours? Do we share the same mech­a­nisms, the same struc­tures in our brains? Does some con­ven­tional human phys­i­ol­ogy give idea life? What if your mind had a dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture that mine? Would you be unable to con­ceive of the ideas I present here? Is this para­graph a pro­gram that you exe­cute by read­ing and whose effect is to mod­ify your men­tal state? And is its power not in its deter­min­ism, but in the impre­cise pre­dictabil­ity of your inter­pre­ta­tion of it? Per­haps the vari­abil­ity in my read­ers’ under­stand­ing of these con­cepts serve as the muta­tive oper­a­tor of their evo­lu­tion. Per­haps if ideas live and die like organic forms, bias is the racism of their soci­ety, and objec­tiv­ity their democ­racy. Let these ideas thrive; give them time to breathe. Con­sider for a moment your role in their sur­vival and adap­ta­tion. Think.