- priate, “copy” should be used instead. All reproductions are imitations, including the imitation of the classical period, the reproduce of the industrial age and simulation by computer. All replication is the copy of structure, not only the third stage has structural problems. It is not only the second stage that follows the law of value, the first and third stages also follow the law of value. They do not follow a special law of structural value. Now that the cost of copying code is low, the quantity is large.

In Baudrillard's field of vision, the third stage of simulacrum is mainly used to describe a kind of image culture provided to the public in contemporary society, such as television images. Although this kind of “image can reflect the basic reality” first, it will “mask and distort the basic reality” and then “cover up the absence of basic reality” and finally proceed to the field of “purely its own imagination”, associated with no real happening. What simulacrum creates is an artificial reality or a second nature.^[7]

Baudrillard has obviously exaggerated the role of symbols, forgetting the decisive effect of material objectivity on consciousness, and the simulacrum theory has become an absurd theory. The second nature created by simulacrum is just Popper's third world. But Baudrillard only notice that contemporary society has a second nature. In fact, ancient times also had a second nature. Many ancient people were addicted to the imagination world and could not extricate themselves, such as chess fans, authors and readers of famous novels. Although today's imagery is extremely developed, it will never completely separate from the real world. The most crazy video game fans will also have to eat, sleep, marry and make money. If someone can really survive in the unreal world, then that world must not be illusory.

The Charm and Flaw of Meme Theory

Blakemore's Meme theory stresses that imitation is the key to biological evolution and cultural evolution, human learning is an imitation. Blackmoore refers to people as “the meme machine.” Cultural reproduction is based on imitation, unlike narrow reproduction, which is based on self-replication. This notion is not only correct, but imitation is more important than Aigen's hypercirculation, and it is more definitive than Eric Jantsch's autocatalysis. Imitation is a kind of replication, and replication is the main way for a complex system to maintain non-equilibrium.

The meme theory is a generalized evolutionary theory, the general evolution is a worldview, the worldview is the basis of meta-ethics, meta-ethics is the basis of episte- mology, and epistemology is the basis of ontology. But neither Blackmore nor her teacher, Richard Dawkins, saw the fundamental position of meme theory on philosophy.

The biggest flaw in the meme theory is that it does not recognize the essence of the meme. Blackmore's definition of meme is “instructions for carrying out behaviour, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation.”