I was being totally serious. And remember that our successors won't necessarily look like us, or even understand or remember us.
Viewed in terms of the races of the Black and Red (and maybe Silver) Queens, evolution has been a race to develop more useful and flexible forms of computation (at the expense of durability to the forms that information may take -- a star is much more resilient than, let's say, a redwood tree). It makes sense for the next evolutionary step to be, in that same spirit, a race purely of information and computation, with the critical caveat that it can't survive on its own (with the attendant advantage that it also doesn't itself need to eat, shit, or reproduce, and spreads instantly to anything that encounters it, and lives essentially forever -- remember POGs? Well, now you do).
While an amusing idea, it only has a single data point (Earth) and even in that case the superior computational organism was nearly wiped out by drought. Progress != Evolution in any sense. Evolution goes for low-hanging fruit and short-term solutions, by definition. Intelligence needs to be locally favorable for something like humans to arise. Which it isn't, necessarily; brains are energy intensive. Adapting our stomachs for grazing or whatever could have been fitter given slightly different circumstances.
You've probably considered this, but your idea of some kind of information ecology seems dependent on these ideas not trying to compel their "hosts" to destroy their competitor's hosts, as it were.
If we're to take this idea to its logical extension, the "perfect lifeform" is a stupid, non-sentient (too much intelligence/complexity generates competing ideas) machine that knows (much like how ants know how to build a colony i.e. with little thought) enough physics and engineering to destroy any other hosts. I'm not sure what the minimum knowledge threshold you need to declare innovation and intelligence obsolete, but I'm sure it exists.
tl;dr meaning of life is to destroy the other
ANYWAY
In some respects, medication for mental issues is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's some semi-compelling musing/research recently about depression being an intentional brain mechanism to force focus on fixing a particular problem, but our society allows us to still be very comfortable doing jack shit sitting on the couch all day so our brain stays in that state, leading to eventual semi-permanent altering of brain chemistry and the necessity for anti-depressant medication.
Would not be surprised if a few other common mental conditions were similar.
..do you happen to remember any of these? I've never heard of it. I can't really see crippling self-loathing, constant pain, etc. talked about by any clinically depressed person being helpful for problem solving. Maybe it's a
misdirected mechanism that works in other cases? The brain does that a lot, so it would make more sense.
I can't really see how the hallucinating and what not in say, schizophrenia, is supposed to help with that society is preventing, though.
