模倣子 Synthetic Religion

 Memetic Index - what purpose religion? - ideomemetic appeal - engineering non-violence - memeto-dynamics of group membership - priestly/rabbinical - The Big Other -

Was just having a chat with a buddy last night about “primordial religion” (and also “dogmatic efficiency”) or a perhaps more to the pint term is “minimal religion” or what does a religion minimally accomplish for a group of humans and what is the minimal and essential collection of memes needed to accomplish that function?

Will it inevitably snowball memetically, ie, accrete dogma and lose dogmatic efficiency over time?

It seems to be related to shame and empathy, providing a template for conformity, ie, what can an individual do in order to not invite immunomemetic overtures from peers?

This need is very real—the fear of the other. Anything that addresses this fear is worth paying a high cost, perhaps even the cost of what we see in religious adherence. 

But does religion actually address this?

The dream is that a “minimal synthetic religion” could be devised to fill this need, fit well into our modern scientific and industrial reality (instead of the Stone Age proto-agricultural feudalistic reality that most current religions are based on)

The overarching question is “do humans need religion?” “do religions develop organically, spontaneously, inevitably?” And “if religions are somehow essential, what is their minimal memetic feature set or inventory?”

Assuming there’s something to this, ie, religion is somehow essential, will form organically in a vacuum anyway, feels some real need with some minimal memetic inventory beyond which leads to increasing “dogmatic inefficiency”, and so forth, the question is twofold—can we engineer a “synthetic religion” or “minimal religion” that fills these needs with minimal bullshit harmful mumbo-jumbo, and how do we engineer the transition from the current religions to the new one?

I’ve come up with a concept called “memetic tunneling”. I’ve been working on this idea in terms of “memetically evaporating” the particularly frightening religious fanatic sect in my town. More on this anon. 

Another religion issue is dogma and magical or metaphysical thinking involvement and how memetic pairing works to marry normal life memes, rational stuff, to batshit 🦇 💩 magical made-up stuff, and the result is the creation and concentration of unreasonable and irrational power in the hands of a few over many. That mechanism seems inevitable, is almost certainly the root of “dogma creep” leading to dogmatic overload and inefficiency, and if that cancerous accretive phenomenon cannot be well understood and controlled, then there may be little point to an engineering effort. 

To restate, think of dogma as the collection of the irrational, magical 🧙 memes, which have this radioactive ☢️ ability to pair with “real” memes such as the rôle of women, diet, treatment of children, dress norms, the attitude toward and treatment of outgroup members, proselytization, etc, in other words all the stuff that make religions distinctive and often scary. 

Some minimal dogma is probably necessary to create group identity, ie, create a memetic inventory around which group members can cohere. But what is that minimum?

If we can posit a “minimal religion” then we can begin to think of a minimal dogmatic memetic inventory, which implies a maximal dogmatic efficiency, ie, each magical meme is doing maximal work, and additional memes degrade that efficiency. 

It’s worthwhile to consider how efficiency of dogmatic memes is not necessarily related to sheer number. I could go on at some length about how the “God meme” is a central Pilar of Abrahamic religions, does a lot of the dogmatic heavy lifting, but is also a kind of memetic sledgehammer to which other cultures and religions employ the multiple scalpels to accomplish the same things with arguably higher fine tuning, robustness, etc

Of course language by itself has a lot of magical memetic properties, eg, it is often the foundation for memetic pairing, in addition to a crucial glue for human social groups, so it is like a religion 

Right on!

Their dogma has a lot of crazy and harmful nonsense, but there is also the memetic engineering concept of “packing the meme space” whereby you protect the memetic inventory by creating a bunch of memes whose primary function is merely to take up space (since the brain can only hold so many at once). However, filler memes can mutate and become active, or pair with other internal or external memes, pulling more in and activating more (dogmatic) functionality and pathways 

I wrote at least one essay on the function of

The priestly/ rabbinical class in terms of the husbandry of the memetic inventory of a religion

模倣子 crumbling feminist narrative

 

Debunk feminist narrative 

Crumbling feminist narrative 

Feminist Future will be Brutal 

模倣子 Pretty Privilege

 

Captain Israel 

Wonder Woman powers

模倣子 Mortal Computation

 Memetics index

I just had a flash about my own mental health issues that might have relevance to our discussions of consciousness 

Imagine that some quantities of identity such as self-esteem (the right to be protected, participate, etc) or enjoyment (the right to pursue one’s interests, the right to feel that one’s own interests and enjoyment are existentially important, etc) are a kind of hypersurface. 

So the “imitation” of actual mental health may be accomplished by a few points on that surface such as “I like movies” or “I like sports” or “I’m a good person/worker/Christian” or “I  avoid situations where I might encounter conflict”

The problem is that such a hack is a sparse discontinuity and is therefore undifferentiable and not meaningfully integrable 

That’s probably a whole tin of worms 🪱 unto itself, but let’s move

On for the moment

The “mortal substrate” question may rush to

The rescue here

* mortal computation, I think 

I’ll have to listen to

That paper again, since more I think about it the

More I find the “mortal substrate” idea pseudo-argumentative and question-beggy

Like yet another “here’s another implementation difference so human consciousness wins again, nyah, nyah, nyah!”

Oh, just that the brain 🧠 implements consciousness one way, and silicon 🤖 is a different implementation. 

But I think it does add “smoothing effect” which means you get a tighter approximation for less energy and hardware, your get some non-linearities (I always worry I’m misusing that term), which give you differentiability and integrability everywhere

While a digital or severely traumatized (human) gives you singularities everywhere 

You can try to approximate it better and better with more test cases and mantras or whatever, but you always, and especially in those problematic edge

Cases you’re try to deal with, fix, close up, you get hallucinations, wrong answers that Just seem so dang right, or just non-convergence 

The idea 💡 that a drug 💊 impacts the brain 🧠 in such and such a way does defeat the incremental neuron-with-chip analogy, but it also seems like a kind of red herring 🐟 or questionable-begging 

The stuff they talk about with “mortal substrate”* strikes me as the presence of a kind of hysteresis in the wetware 🧠 (biological) substrate, eg, the more you think about a thing or skill, the more engrained it gets, whereas in order to implement this same kind of phenomenon, inherent in the meat-brain 🧠 🥩 platform, is actually quite expensive in the straight silicon 🤖 approach, requiring a lot

More hardware, more time, and thus more power to not even quite do it 

A physics/mathematics question: do spaces where points on that space exhibit hystereses have higher granularity, or anything interesting?

I’m thinking along lines such as how even if the number of states is the same, the number of pathways whereby given states may be approached is lessened, which represents a higher level of learning

This idea of hysteresic N-spaces might have a lot of relevance to macromemetics as well, which should surprise no one.  

Have you heard of Brain organoids?

I think that’s the term…

Had another listen. Is seems shot through with question-begging à la “why IS consciousness impossible to

Implement on non-biological substrates?”

More on that, later. 

One thought is how trauma victims may look like allopoetic entities as wel, rather like factories, etc

More

On that…and ramifications for discrete manifolds and therapy directions 

The landscape of a digital intelligence and a trauma victim’s perceptual/cognitive manifolds may have useful similarities, eg, their rigidity, propensity to conflations (hallucination), undifferentiability, and widespread singularities. 

The podcast listed a final danger, ie, that not so much that we create a real intelligence but that we “computerify” ourselves in the process

I submit that this has already long ago happened, eg, with calling computer storage “memory” and such 

Pathology and edge/corner cases shed light, showing that something different is happening behind the scenes, eg, dissociative disorder, trauma (same thing), amnesia, perceptual anomalies, addictions, etc

“Normie” reactions to and prescriptions for addiction and dissociative identity disorder ring like “that’s not how memory works” (because of course it works the same as a computer) or “just download better software/tweak some parameters” (because of course self-destructive/dysfunctional behavior is just wrong, bad code, and has no underlying bases that make any sense)

It might be useful to look at digital intelligences and trauma cases as sparse, punctilious spaces mapped onto hypermanifolds.

This has ramifications that may shed light on the nature of consciousness, the refinement of AI 🤖 and the treatment of dissociative disorders

More to come on this…

Therapists regularly corner patients around their irrational behavior, probably by forcing an alter to acknowledge his/her own limitations and logical inconsistencies as well as irrational fears (this is all part and parcel of dissociative therapy, among others)

It’s sometimes an “ah-ha” moment leading immediately to healing, but not necessarily, rather like an AI 🤖 who “hallucinates”

Alcoholics and other mental patients confabulate similarly, and I tend to agree that this is a better term than “hallucination” for AIs 🤖 but not for the reason given, ie, that hallucination is a “feeling” rather than an “action” and therefore beyond the ken of mere automata. 

It’s also questionable that confabulation can be blithely classed as an “action” — another “computerification” (as opposed to anthropomorphisization which they incessantly worry about in the other direction) where a brain 🧠 function is tacitly classed as algorithmic… because it just “seems” that way. Analogies become models become descriptions, become assumptions about physical reality—we

Must be cautious in all directions. 

They touch on this, ie, humans make the tests so that they alone can pass them, no animals or other designs allowed, and the term I was searching for is essentialism. 

It’s like question-begging or putting up strawmen, but here more applicable perhaps. 

I thought of another implication of the podcast…oh yes, I think I’ve got it. 

It’s to Do with analogues between network behavior in response to increased load, how individuals in different cultures respond to questions when they don’t know the answer or when they know a bad outcome for the asker will not come back

To bite them * and confabulation behavior of AI 🤖 

Computer networks respond to increased loads by resending and ultimately dropping packets. Packets travel by different

Routes when

Loads need to be distributed and arrive on different sequences and are reässembled at the destination, and resend requests sent for bits that didn’t arrive. 

This in ways resembles the “many drafts” model of consciousness. 

One question is whether to send a resend request, a send failure, or to confabulate a message, and similar questions exist on the sending side, respond properly/improperly to resend

Requests, ignore them, press on despite failure messages or lack of acknowledgments and keep sending more stuff, stop sending midway, or other such. 

This is all Byzantine generals stuff, but how does consciousness deal with it? Like a fish 🐠 out of water 💦 not gracefully—just flop around or have a seizure and hope for a state reboot. 

I subscribe to the notion, mentioned in the podcast, I think, that consciousness serves to “model” the information from the senses into some kind of set of expectations, on a many drafts approach applied to sensory input flowing in over a distributed time period, and when that expectation begins to clash egregiously with what is more and more continuing to

Come in, the consciousness starts to

Confabulate and ultimately falls into any of a number of usually well-know and unattractive failure modes (a psycho-cerebral 🧠 

404 error, if you will 😜)

* Japanese may not tend to say “I don’t know” while Americans do, and may confabulate)hallucinate, and Americans may rein it in for more serious questions while the Japanese may actually go the opposite way, among

Many other scenarios. As frequency or difficulty of questions accelerates, confabulation or demurring behavior may increase or phase change 

漫画 Louise as WeChat profile Picture

 Manga index 

Cool movement videos

 Sexy bello sisters. https://youtu.be/KTlEp-wTDWs?si=ulFhtQb6xhSXMoO3

Smooth movement

Doll dancer 💃 https://youtube.com/shorts/MCbEYtcUFzU?si=mGcOVJsBKZx2S4Nq

Amazing industrial stuff https://youtu.be/d0NuD-pL7JE?si=LVIelZgFBgB6NrFJ

air and water stuff https://youtube.com/shorts/eL1mi4vwdzI?si=087OSw6ai3s3MRCN

diving dancing etc  https://youtube.com/shorts/OZUljkOf3W4?si=8zR6LtjZJ3scagQn

DoorDash girl indicted

 https://youtu.be/qOckrPb2Nw4?si=kajGtX_3QzpARp7R