模倣子 Autoimmunomemetic Self-Bullying, PTSD, CBT, and Memetic Engineering
Introduction
Hitherto, I have not elaborated much (2) on endoemetic systems or ideomemetic systems (1)
I want to make a system using memetic analysis and memetic engineering to address PTSD issues, in other words, to apply memetic engineering principles to working the
Twelve Steps of ACA.
Ideas From Theory
The theory in play is that when we stuffer restimulations of resentments, it's an interaction of memes. There is a residual memetic debt that is created as the Inner Child initiates a memetic interaction with the Critical Parent. The IC wants to avoid alienation (abandonment), but is only able to deploy dysfunctional memes that produce suffering.
Another thing to remember is that we are dealing with an ideomemeplex (2), which is an endomemeplex. In other words, the memes we are dealing with do not come from other people on the outside, but all within ourselves. This means we may have a great deal more power to control (3) and a much greater ability to measure and understand. This is nothing like the situation where we're trying to memetically engineer for a human population.
Okay, so the hopefully correct insight is that resentments are an example of a kind of "self-bullying" or autoimmunomemes, or immunomemes that operate within the individual's own mind (or internal memetic fabric).
Method and Approach
The key is to tease apart what these interactions are, using real data. Ultimately the goal is to "starve" the CP, or the Critical Parent Memeplex. There must be many memes that hook right into the CPM. What do these look like?
Normal life events, or flashbacks, occur. A healthy person responds creatively, comes up with an approach based on safety, resources available, levels of risk, and manages the level of escalation (how angry, how afraid, etc.). Persons suffering from cPTSD (4) or having survived dysfunctional family upbringing have difficulty meeting daily challenges, and are often in constant emotional pain, as if old hurts keep getting replayed over and over in one form or another.
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(1) Or the difference between the two, which may be a grey area.
(3) Among ACA (and AA) folks, "control" can be something of a dirty word. Here I just mean that we can literally know a lot about something and make it do what we want to a great and reliable extent. What people are usually getting their knickers in a twist about is "the illusion of control."
(4) complex post-traumatic stress disorder
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模倣子 The Principle of Memetic Loops
Introduction
The memetic loop is a model of how the brain processes memes. It describes how humans decide to enact/deploy memes and how they hope to get reactions from their fellow humans. It has repercussions into areas like currency inflation to intergenerational abuse to genocide to classist, racist, and sexist oppression.
My current expression of the Three Laws of Macromemetics don't include, at last not clearly, the concept of the memetic loop. I believe that the First Law could be phrased so as to encompass the memetic loop, and still retain its current power.
The memetic loop is related to
The Principle of Closure, i.e., that we don't get our memetic reward (1) until the loop is closed.
Painful Waiting
Human beings are like Mr. Meeseeks from the hit TV show Rick and Morty, in that the human brain seeks to "close the loop" on a meme as soon as possible.
When a meme is deployed, a memetic debt is incurred, which is to say a memetic loop is opened, which causes discomfort, the urge for the loop to be closed again. This loop closure results in a "memetic reward" (1).
The Pain of Rejection
Being able to close a memetic loop, or get a memetic response to one's own memetic deployment, tends to be more important than whether one is actually harmed or oppressed by the memetic exchange. It's important to have the attention of others, regardless of whether that attention is pleasant or no.
Stress of Exclusion
I have not looked into this very much so far (2), but there's an idea that it's stressful, painful, to be unable to participate in certain memetic exchanges in which others are taking part. These exchanges may be economic, sensual, culinary, experiential, etc.
Fig. 1. A Memetic Loop
An individual can be excluded from a group by the inability to properly enact the "meme out" to the group, which could be immaturity or lack of knowledge, like when a person arrives in a foreign country where they don't speak the language (yet). This is an example of "alienation." The person has no memes they can deploy to get a reaction from the group. If they could deploy such memes, the group would respond, but they lack the skill and experience.
The other possibility is that the group for whatever reason refuses to deploy one of perhaps several return memes in response to otherwise valid memes deployed on the part of the individual. This could be that the group has deliberately not shared the "secret handshake," making it impossible for the individual to interact with the group. This is a form of alienation, but since it's deliberate, we might still want to class it as "oppression" (3). When we talk about "oppression" we typically mean deploying oppressive memes instead of the usual memes lavished on group members.
The Laws and Loops
Table 1. The Three Laws of Macromemetics
1. An agent deploys memes in order to achieve optimal resonance
2. Deployment of a meme causes transition to a new state
3. A mutation is a Modification, Addition, or Deletion of a State, an Agent, or a Meme (MADSAM)
I propose to update the First Law of Macromemetics to include the concept of memetic loops as the basis for meme deployment by agents. In fact, "optimal resonance" may be uselessly vague. What about the other laws? These are macromemetic laws, as opposed to micromemetic laws. They bear upon the behavior of a system. The First Law as stated is a micromemetic law. This may not be a problem since memetic loops are where the individual's urge to participate in memetic exchanges merges with the fact that those individuals with whom the agent wishes to enter said exchanges may in fact be a group. And even if said exchanges are only between single individuals, the result can change the memetic landscape for all.
There are things like intergenerational dysfunction and abuse within families, and even between entire nations. There are performers who perform before an audience, or writers who write novels and other documents that influence millions and return the writer or performer. This theory may be the basis for why seeking fame, renown, political office, infamy are all so intriguing to our psyches.
Let's see how we like this:
The First Law of Macromemetics: Memetic agents open memetic loop by deploying memes
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(1) a.k.a. "Memetic orgasm"
(2) I may have published some essays that deal with this issue already. For instance the possible importance of
experiencing penetration during sexual intercourse, among other things.
(3) Technically this would be oppression, since if the individual asks to be shown the secret handshake, or other trappings of group membership, the refusal to do so is in fact an oppressive meme deployment, i.e., rather than deploy the "I'll show you" or "fill in these forms" meme, one deploys some kind of refusal. Oppression is the deployment of other-than-expected or other-than-hoped-for memes, while alienation is no (meaningful) memetic exchange.
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模倣子 Sex Immunomemes Hurt Majority Culture as Well
Introduction
The mainstream or majority culture frequently uses sex stereotypes to make laws to oppress minority culture. The Macromemetic viewpoint is that this practice hurts the oppressing majority culture as well in the process.
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模倣子 Cost Decay of the Service Sector
Introduction
A basic tenet of macroeconomics is what is termed The Cost Decay of the Service Sector. Put simply, as production of goods becomes increasingly efficient, it becomes possible to pay manufacturing workers (2) more and more since they effectively product more and more wealth (1). Meanwhile, service workers (and manual workers) cannot increase their output at the same rate, or in many cases, at all. It may be slightly faster to vacuum a floor with a newer vacuum cleaner, but the time to make a cup of coffee, care for children, bus a table, and so on, remain the same over decades, even centuries.
Let's ask ourselves what things might start to look like as the efficiency of production becomes perfect (4), and set aside ideas such as rent (5) and frictional elements (3) such as sales, advertising, transportation (4), etc. In other words, what might an economy look like where effectively all economic agents are engaged in service of one kind or another, and their income is gauged solely on their working time, and not, as production workers, on the impact their time has on the economy.
A Model
Let's say we have a population of lawyers, baristas, and massage therapists. The lawyers and therapists make $150 per hour, and the baristas make $15.
In order for a lawyer to bill one $150 hour, they need one barista to pay ten hours of their labor, or 25% of a week's wages. To bill a forty-hour week, forty such legally aggrieved baristas are required. To bill a whole year (6), nine hundred baristas are required.
Let's say that massage therapists do one to three sessions a day, seven days a week, so $1,050 to $3,150 per week.
We need to talk about living costs.
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(1) An interesting side note is that "brain workers" or "media workers," and this could include people like insurance and banking people (3), are able to generate enormous wealth as the products of their labor may be distributed digitally, or through media where the cost of the media itself (2) is a small fraction of the "cost of distribution." For the sake of this argument, I'll probably neglect "frictional" [c.f. Bill Gates] economic costs.
(2) It might be worth noting that in the "celluloid film" period of movie distribution, the cost of the actual "prints" was about 10% of the cost of distribution, the rest being advertizing (3).
(3) Salespeople might be an interesting special case, by the way. Marketing and advertising are another "hidden cost" of the functioning of a market economy. I'll probably neglect these for the sake of argument.
(4) Possibly accomplished by robots, for instance.
(5) Which actually encompasses not only renting land space, but also the output of the means of production, in other words, all income derived from ownership as opposed to labor.
(6) Say a barista only needs legal representation once per year.
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摸倣子 Do We Need the Police?
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模倣子 Whence Tolerance for Bullying?
Memetic
Index
Introduction
It seems no organization deals well with bullies, unless you have policies and special enforcers to deal with it, which few if any do. The role the police play in society may approach this. Criminals are bullies in a way, especially habitual criminals. However, organized criminals, who try to maintain their criminal activities over time, are difficult to deal with. Ironically enough, from my experiences working at disorganized, chaotic companies, they actually deal with it better, since there are localized power holders who can act outside of the hierarchy to stop bullies, including with threats, to protect another employee who's doing something important for them. Of course, this is hardly equitable.
In the rigid hierarchy of a well organized society, a bully can get away with bending the rules, and if they can snow the person they report to directly, they can get away with a lot of stuff, possibly indefinitely. Actually, the more they're allowed to get away with something, the more they can get away with it, for longer, and even increase and expand the scope of their misdeeds. It's a macromemetic when you think about it. The longer something goes on, the more stakeholders get used to responding to the stimuli (or not responding, same thing) and they actually become resistant to giving up that pattern of (memetic) reaction. It's a kind of Bystander Effect which gets more and more engrained with time. I should write an essay about this!
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摸倣子 Human Futures
Slack Futures
Angel investors buying slack so people can get ahead and then perhaps getting benefit from their payback when they achieve success or create something valuable that they have no time for.
Guilt/karmic debt or gratitude equity.
Minimum Wage the Problem thereof
making small employers pay is nonsense. full employment as a positive externality. all should pay, perhaps as tax-deductible donation, or couple at supermarket, buying car, etc. similar to "unattached coffee" or "dental donation" or such.
employers have to qualify to receive and proceeds are paid directly to employees.
Local Food Futures
These are also needed, e.g., organic produce, local produce, "Buy Local" is a pretty hollow slogan without some sort of futures trading capitalization infrastructure. Hemp futures market.
The rich should have to pay extra taxes which could be ablated offset by tax-deductible investments in the "human futures" market, where it might be possible to make money, even a lot of it, from judicious investment in the "slack" of the right people who just need a break.
The human futures market would be set up privately, with government approval, and there would be motivation to do so, in each State or region, in order to provide a relief from "minimum wage support taxes"
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模倣子 MIAOplexes, Ideomemeplexes, and State Transition
Index of Memetic Materials
IntroductionMIAO bonding (MIAOplex Formation) seems a promising way to perform memetic analysis on a cohort and evince their memetic inventory. Ideomemetic systems, or ideomemeplexes, promise to provide a hidden layer in the network model of memetic state transitions (1). This may resolve race conditions and probability distributions associated with memetic deployment (2). This may actually make it possible to identify nearly arbitrarily long memetic pathways deterministically (3). Further, I'd like to begin to rigorously lay out the
notation system of my
memetic diagrams and include some examples here.
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(1) Assuming any and all difficulties of complexity and actually evincing the structure of ideomemeplexes through memetic analysis and memetic hacking, for instance.
(2) Need a consistent term here, i.e., the process of determining which meme of the available memes is select for deployment a each juncture.
(3) Here we approach the idea of Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov's
Foundation Trilogy, i.e., "psychohistory," where the behavior of large groups of people may actually be
predicted reliably.
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模倣子 Memetic Essay
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模倣子 Mutation and Cigar Club
Still needs to be written
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模倣子 The Drive to Conquest
Memetic Index
It's another Macromemetic Monday! I've been sheltering from COVID-19 for six months now!
Introduction
Obviously, since everything comes back to a Macromemetic explanation, the same must be true for the urge to conquer, like Alexander the Great, Napoléon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, the Romans, and on and on. One wonders why getting a bunch of guys together, along with expensive horses and weapons, and traipsing across often unpleasant and hostile country to get into bloody conflict with some other bunch of people who are probably even more determined since it's their home (and the women are right there so they can join the fight) and haven't got supply lines to worry about, which by the way, you do, might remotely be a good idea.
Except we don't.
The fundamental questioning of this whole concept simply doesn't seem to leap to mind. That's weird. That's the kind of thing that Macromemetics was invented to provide elegant and scientific (falsifiable and extensible) answers to. Let's see if there might be one, or at least the beginnings of it.
What's the Motivation?
Okay, my first thought is to dismiss the idea of the urge to conquest being a purely Malthusian one. We've got too many people, so let's take all of our youngest, most fit-to-breed young men and load 'em up with as many kill-tools as they can carry, and send 'em over the horizon to kill off the young and healthy men "over there" and if they succeed rape all the women. So it's either a win, we get read of all these extra mouths to feed, for the rest of their young lives, and we get rid of all the children they'd've sired, for the rest of their young lives. Or, it's win-win, where we get rid of them, and they kill off fit-to-breed young men on the other side, and take their place in fathering children we couldn't afford to have them father around here.
Who's Doing the Fighting?
Often things that don't make sense when modeled generically or heterogeneously start making lots of sense when it's some "them" who is doing more of the participation in the crazy activity, for example Jews under the Russians and black guys under the Americans in Vietnam. The Russians drafted all young Jewish men, so a Jewish man was separated from his shtetl from mid-teens into his forties, more or less, effectively removing him from his community, even if he didn't get killed off in some war or war-related mishap. The Turks did the same to the Albanians. Black guys were overwhelmingly drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. The Romans and the British did similar things, but don't let's muddy the pond too much.
Did this make these empires more effective in winning wars? Probably didn't make that much difference, but maybe that's not true. Something to consider. It tends to undermine those minority communities, obviously. Also, every black guy that goes to Vietnam, or Jew or Albanian that goes into the army, it taking a spot that would otherwise be filled by a white guy, a Russian, or a Turk.
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模倣子 Residual Memetic Debt
Background
I'm going to be writing a novel this November as a textbook for Macromemetics. I want to illustrate the basic principles and some of their functions in allegorical stories with a constant group of characters.
Even though it's already National Novel Writing Month at this point and I'm already writing the novel, I want to get these "articles" about the principles I want to cover written and ready-to-go before November starts (and into December).
Introduction
Memetic loops, engagement, marking. inflation and bank closures
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模倣子 Memetic States, Diagrams and Matrices
Background
I'm going to be writing a novel this November as a textbook for Macromemetics. I want to illustrate the basic principles and some of their functions in allegorical stories with a constant group of characters.
Even though it's already National Novel Writing Month at this point and I'm already writing the novel, I want to get these "articles" about the principles I want to cover written and ready-to-go before November starts (and into December).
Discuss the diagrammatic representation of states, maybe compare to Feynmann Diagrams. Discuss the matrix representation (people x memes with next states at vertices). Problems with infinities with this representation, management of complexity.
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模倣子 Immunomemeticizing Others' 40-Hour Work Week
The europeans are lazy slugs with their 6 months off per year, and the japanese are ant-like unfeeling robots who never take holidays even though neither is true but "they're lazy and undisciplined unlike us" and "you should feel lucky that you don't have to work like the Japanese and Koreans" both serve to immunize the american status quo of practically no public holidays combined with a measly 2 weeks off per year.
link the the
cheese-dick essay on the imaginary other
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模倣子 The thrill of getting nekkid in front of strangers
"I sometimes think that the male equivalent of women's fashion would be wearing clothing covered in provocative slogans and then contorting one's body and limbs to prevent anyone from actually reading them (and getting self-righteously offended if anybody tried)"
[on a doode modeling for an art class and for medical students]
"...somehow I think the initial attraction would wear off even for men if it were chronic. I mean, there is a line many women feel crossed when admiration turns into objectification..."
This is a telling phrase, and typical. What do you think?
She assumes there is some "attraction" which is never stated, and says things like "even for men" which makes this tacit assumption that men are different is some fundamental way -- classic question-begging. She assumes that there is "admiration" (or whatever) and not objectification (whatever that is -- vaguely-defined terms are another hallmark of rhetorical sloppiness and crypto-question-begging) a priori which is effectively a strawman, or again, more question-begging, i.e., she's used these unsupported tacit assumptions to dismiss an example which could be interesting and which potentially undermines the crypto-pseudo-feminist party line.
Her assumption is that the "line" is not "crossed" in the example you cited. Another hidden assertion is that women don't like to be the center of observation, and sidesteps the idea that they in fact deliberately and systematically invite it, which is effectively what I'm doing in this case, whereas I could just as easily choose not to, thereby not making it "chronic". So I'm inviting this intimate sexually-charged attention, and it's a kind of compulsion that comes with a giddy rush and emotional conflict which many people would choose to avoid for probably equally fraught reasons.
However, she applies a number of shopworn (and deeply flawed and unsupported) assumptions, spackling them onto yet another situation as if they somehow address and categorize the issue.
She does throw a bone to the idea that women should like getting lots of undeserved attention (anybody would, right?), and then somehow makes it bad, which effectively is the thin rationale for shaming men for the fact that they are deeply attracted to women. And yet, women somehow don't like it, which is never addressed, along with the politics behind short skirts and such whereby they deliberately attract it.
ME: Oh, I have to go and get naked in front of a bunch of strangers again. Some of them can be real pigs. Some of the female medical students really like to get in there and take their time and they seem to forget that I'm even a person at all. [sometimes I like it] Sometimes I really hate that I have to take off all my clothes [put on make-up, put on plunging necklines & short skirts] and be gawked at all day long, and the medical students touch me and the artists draw pictures of me naked and look at me and it's just chronic day to day and it wears me down. And they all thank me afterwards, I mean, I don't know them, I don't want to have a relationship with them. Who do they think they are?
...when of course the reality is that I
don't have to do any of that. Whatever my reasons for attracting that attention, and they are probably at least somewhat fraught, oh sure, I have a few pad answers that cover the problem, but probably not the whole picture. Point being that it would be ridiculous for me to say any such thing, i.e., complain when a) I invite the attention, indeed, engineer its happening, and b) positive attention from others is by default a good thing and its being otherwise is what requires explanation, not the reverse.
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模倣子 Apathy, Insanity, and Immunomemes
IntroductionWhat is insanity? What is apathy? It occurs to me that they may both be a
shortage of memes that overlap or are able to interact with a given other memetic system, e.g., "society at large" or "the new program" or what-have-you.
Is this also a practical working definition of "
genius"?
OverviewHappy people are people who always know what to say and how to react to what is happening in the society around them. Or rather, they may be unhappy, but they feel that they "fit in". There is a difference between these two states, and perhaps a clarification of terms or wordsmithy is required here. There is oppression and there is exclusion. What are the parameters here? Personal freedom? Memetic latitude? Range of memes with which one may interact? Or as Slavoj ZheZhek might term it, non-participation in the prevailing ideology.
So what are we talking about here? We have the concept of an ideomemeplex, which is the internal economy of memes, or rather, the set of memes which the individual is able to respond to, and how they are able to respond. This gives us the idea of test/response or test/resonance meme pairs, and a given test meme may have more than one response meme.
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模倣子 Annoying Americanisms
Introduction
These could almost be thought of as "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" (3) that have somehow become normalized. And the paint a picture of the culture, a form of static, already done memetic hacking.
Cases in Point
"Do you know what it is?" (1)
gender of child
"Do you want room?"(2)
coffee
"I forgot to check."
TP in the bog
"awesome"
"sucks"
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(1) Star Wars enabling of dysfunctional, misogynistic cultural patterns. When Padme/ex-Queen Amadala gave birth to Luke and Leia (in that order), the midwife robot said "Oido" and then "Oida". So there are two messages: somehow a midwife robot would be programmed with a language (and probably only that one, otherwise she'd be speaking in English/Botchi or whatever, right?), and which is Indo-European-like in that it has gender, and maybe like Modern English AND that that is the most important feature she announces when the baby is born, as opposed to "healthy" or such. As opposed to Japanese, for instance where something like yubi juppon genki-na aka-chan manzoku (or something)"
(2) another variation is "Double-shot Americano with room". Don't let's forget the term "counter-sip" (sucking off the top bit of a coffee that's too full while it's still sitting on the counter). Why do we have words for this stuff?!!
(3) From MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee.
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模倣子 Male vs. Female Privilege
Apparently
men don't suffer from the state of "gender inequality" that currently exists.
She might look up Tim Wise, by the way.
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模倣子 The News and the Rise of the Middle Class
Introduction
Warning: This is all highly speculative. It's something where I see a possible macromemetic connection, and it could form the impetus for a program of research, in this case, into history and communications.
I don't know if I've written about these topics before, at least hinted at them, hopefully. Why do people follow sports, for God's sake? In particular, watch them...after they already happened, or read about them even further after the fact -- why? I have never understood that...until I started studying Macromemetics, that is. Spoiler Alert: sports is a memetic nexus...and so is the news, the weather, and even, yes, shocker, science!
Memetic Nexus Changes Everything!
Macromemetically speaking, what are people doing when they follow the news, the weather, sports? Do they never, ever talk to anybody else about it, or view it with other people, or talk about it on the phone while watching it. According to Jane McGonigal, following sports goes back to ancient Mesopotamia and before, chariot racing teams and so forth. Riots by fans to rival today's drunken British soccer lager louts.
Why do people care about this stuff? Why do they club together and act like crazies?
The theory is that these activities, such as the complex rule-based, clear-outcomed (1), performed at specific timed sports events are perfect for supplying a large cohort with fresh systems of memes that they can exchange, enact, get guaranteed resonance off of, in other words, pretty darn close to a memetic orgy. And this is a guaranteed memetic orgy, and that is very appealing in a way that few things are.
In his original comic strip, Life in Hell, Matt Groeing, creator of The Simpsons, in his strip entitled 'So you want to be a graduate student?' asks whether you 'like using jargon.' It's a joke, but it's real.
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(1) Marking is a term that refers to how a memetic enactment is clear in what it is in response to, what provoked it, and what responses. It's the tit-for-tat level of a memetic exchange. High marking has a positive effect on
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模倣子 The Lens of our own Biases
Not too much confusion. My main takeaway from seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls and where they were discovered was that they were found to be much much older than the texts that they were exact copies of, so they push the origin dates of parts of the Torah back considerably.
Your point, as I understood it, was that societies "without laws" invariably go under and that that is proven by written record going back 5,000 years. I have problems with that statement, which may or may not even do justice to what you were saying, one of which is how clearly we can look into the past using ancient documents and so forth, and whether we can even see their lives without looking through the lens of our own biases. It strikes me as fairly hard, if impossible, to falsify (demonstrate, prove, disprove, whatever), hence at best not very useful, certainly not as concerns social policy dialectics.
The major, perhaps the decisive factor, in the decline of civilizations may well be (and according to Jared Diamond, is) deforestation. America is doing very badly in this regard, if the Fifth Lord Northborne is to be believed (cf "Look to the Land"), as well as many, many other sources.
What I've heard about the Roman Empire, apart from the collapse of democracy, is that the steady debasement of their currency (cf. my sending all the gold to China reference) and the fact that at the time of the Fall, the Empire was literally 75%-80% slave population, i.e., personal freedom and economic and social agency was at a low ebb, which jibes with the collapse of the empires and great nations that I have researched in some detail (unlike Rome, which I have not especially). And these are also the two biggies that we are concerned about in this country these days (well, three, if you add in deforestation, which is absolutely relevant).
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模倣子 The casual, unconscious marginalization of women
These are the things I notice which CPFs don't seem to and which seem to be important to me.
"... Colorado is, above and beyond and especially beneath it all, a redneck state with a sullen horde of pissed-off cowboys, miners, roughnecks, truck drivers, loggers and their womenfolk muttering and seething on the edge of things..."
This is the
kind of thing that makes my ears prick up in terms of normalizing the marginalization of women. This seems like the real thing, much more real and relevant than the shit that CPFs screech on about.
Actually this sentence is not so well written. How marginalized are the women, just "very" or "totally"? Are the women muttering and seething on the edge of things by themselves or are they seething along with the men, those who have job identities, albeit those of slaves to others, which may or may not be enviable. If the former, are the women seething at "their men"? The rest of the sentence suggests the latter, but it didn't seem all that clear.
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模倣子 Capitalist Memes Devour Your Life
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模倣子 Dodgy start for ch1
Memetic
IndexI'm currently at home quarantining myself from the CoViD-19 pandemic.
This is going to take a bit of work to be worth publishing. I think I'll start over...
ForewordI hope to put together a collection of chapters that explain the principles and ideas of Macromemetics as I've worked it out so far. I have a large collection of essays that explore certain specific ideas, which I may link to as appendices. The new material I hope to put together is more of an exposition of Macrometics for someone who wants to acquire an overall understanding of the main ideas of Macromemetics as they stand at the moment, without having to sift through a large collection of unindexed material which while it may be thorough, is perhaps not complete.
Onward!
What is Macromemetics?Memetics, or as I call it, Micromemetics, is the study of the brain, human behavior as it pertains to memes
The most basic principle of Macromemetics, and I would argue, all of memetics, is that of
memetic resonance. The reward one feels when perceiving something iconic (or nostalgic), being recognized as successfully imitating something, or enacting something and having others imitate it. This is the fundamental basis for culture, the conventionality of language, music, and so on. The Maslow's Motivational Model describes layers of needs.
By contrast, the memetic argument is along the lines that the memetic resonance response is critical to the human animal, a motivation which often supercedes basic survival drives such as those for food or shelter. Sex is probably a special case, operating in both the biological (genetic) and memetic replicator domains, and this is significant for the human animal.
The Franklin Reality Model offers a different set of "needs," all of which operate in parallel, so to speak.
Like the Maslow model of human needs, the
Franklin Reality Model proposes its own set of human needs:
- to Live
- to Love and Be Loved
- to Feel Important
- Variety
It might be interesting to mention Dr. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
These are all formulated in terms of a robot's relationship to individual humans. Presupposed is the assumption that a robot is able to distinguish a human. This is not formulated as a law, it is assumed to be inherent to a robot's make-up.
Similarly, the First Principle of Memetics is that humans are able to discriminate memes (2). This includes the ability to enact them as well as recognize their enactment by others. The Second Principle of Memetics is that memetic agents (humans, et al) derive pleasure, or
brain pleasure center reward by exchanging memes.
“Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male”
Back to The Three Laws of Robotics and the Franklin Reality Model. The FRM's needs, apart from "to Live," strike me as having a memetic tinge. How does one "feel important" or "love and be loved" or perceive "variety"? One could posit something to do with being open to learning and enacting novel memes, to form attachments to other memetic agents that enact the same memes, and to safeguard one's own survival when there are no memetic activities to engage in.
That pretty well describes the behavior of perhaps all human beings.
To recap:
The First Principle of Micromemetics: memetic agents are able to discriminate and enact memes.
The Second Principle of Micromemetics: memetic agents
derive pleasure through the exchange of memes.
This is the extent of physiological Micromemetic theory required to support Macromemetics. Given this concept of a memetic agent, an individual (2) who is able to recognize memes, deploy memes, and derive pleasure from this memetic activity, we are led to:
This recalls the idea of an "economic agent" in Microeconomics. This First Law will, as we shall see, supports many different conclusions and phenomena, including the macroscopic behavior of a large number of memetic agents. The objective of Macromemetics is to understand, to predict, even to control the behavior of large numbers of people. This is the objective of Economics, Sociology, Political Science, Marketing, Advertising, Epidemiology, etc., etc. One of the larger goals of Macromemetics are to change large-scale human behavior without bloodshed, or to engender mass human behavior otherwise impossible by hitherto understood methods.
A Telling ExampleThe
linked video points up a number of basic concepts of Macromemetics. First is the Micromemetic concept that humans are programmed to imitate one another. We see one person enacting a behavior. An important factor is that the behavior be readily identified and imitated. Behaviors which are overly complex or unclear, where it's difficult to tell where they start and end, or which aspects of the behavior are central and which are incidental make for poor memes. The video mentions how the "leader" should encourage and recognize "early adopters/followers." The Macromemetic principle at play here is that subsequent adopters will get the strong subliminal message that they will get positive (non-bullying) reaction if they enact the same behavior (meme) themselves. Note that this effect is further enhanced if the leader or early adopter is "high-status" (1). A key phenomenon as the "movement" picks up steam is that the perceived reward becomes more and more certain as the population of cohort members grows. The certainty starts out low, grows as the population enacting it grows, which decreases the number of possible bullies and increases the population of memetic agents who could favorably respond to one's own joining the "movement."
The video also makes the point that it's "not about" the leader or the early adopter. This can translate into the fact that inventors tend not to get much or any credit for their invention, while those who promote it the most are recognized as having "invented" it. This may be the person who was seen as being the most visible enactor when an inflection point was hit, and may be the peak of the movement, and possibly the beginning of formation of memetic polarizations, i.e., people start to see it as equally valuable to join a cohort of "non-joiners" of the movement which has begun to grow rapidly. This is an area of future study.
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(1) See "memetic nexus" later on.
(2) A codicil to this is that one's ability to discriminate memes, including enacting them, is an index of an individual's, including computer/robotic, animal, or plant life, "humanity."
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模倣子 Positivity v. Negativity in Logic and Memetics
Memetic
IndexIntroductionIs there a tendency towards negativity in memetic affairs, and if so, why? I'm trying to analyze why critique groups, among other things, go bad over time. Is the production of 'negative memes' an example of an immunomemetic reaction of a memetic system to novel memes (here, new manuscripts and authors), in accordance with the First Law of Immunomemetics, or is it something else? Is it 'easier' to product negative comments about critique materials than positive ones? If so, is this because positive messages are easier to 'attack' immunomemetically than negative ones, and might there be a rigorous way of describing this mechanism and its negative bias?
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模倣子 Immunomemetic Mate-Guarding
Index of Memetic Materials
Oh, what I put my foot in was that I told a Japanese coworker my "wa-fu burrito" story (Japanese-style burritos) in Japanese because we had a taco potluck today. Her husband was right there. I may have ruffled some feathers.
I had a recent experience of telling a story to a female coworker in her native language while her husband who doesn't speak it was there. This sort of thing has happened to me before, it's probably not a great idea to do it, but the story was funnier in the original language and I wanted to practice.
I don't know how possessive American men are of "their women". Apparently, or at least probably, way more than I think is normal, or would be normal for me. This is probably upsetting to you, moreover. Even the Arabians are probably more lax than the Americans about the idea that if a woman has anything other than female friends, she's a slut if she's unmarried and unfaithful if married. Men are the same, with the added caveat that they only be able to do "manly things" and preferably always by themselves or with at least two other male friends, otherwise they're "gay" (of questionably manliness, which effectively "womanliness", i.e., "no better than women"). I should write about this!
These memes all support one another. Obviously it's another example of how the homophobia memeplex supports misogyny, chauvinism, and oppression of women.
[link to the "SGBF meme" comic]
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模倣子 Memetic Orgy of Live Performance
Introduction
Live performances are better than taped or broadcast performances. Why? One theory is that there is a memetic linkage between the audience and performers, and that they are both able to (not just the performers) enjoy a memetic reward, or "memetic orgasm."
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模倣子 Macromemetics for Beginners
Introduction
The idea that memes, reproducible human behaviors, reproduce in the same way as genes do is taken as a given and as a point of departure for macromemetics. The object of macromemetics is to describe the behavior of systems of memes.
One question
A micromemetic idea that drives macromemetic theory is the memetic reward, also known as the "memetic orgasm." The theory is that, like an orgasm, there is some kind of psysiological reaction
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模倣子 Classism and The Tragedy of the Commons
Index of Memetic Materials
IntroductionThe idea is that if an environment where everybody is at the same level if economic opporunity so that here is no feeling that one's neighbor has more than oneself, like in Japan, then is the motivation to "cheat" lessened? The idea that "the others can afford it more than me"
The idea that the lower classes are undesireable is that they may be cheaters, that they are unaccustomed to participating at the same level of reciprocal altruism as them established members of the group/level.
DiscussionI think of Japan and I also think of our coffee klatch here at work, where all of use are us are middle-class eingineers. is there cheating? is it likely? if everybody gives enough to support contined purchase of the quality of coffee that everybody claims to want, then the theory is supported. if not, i.e., if there can be cheating even among people who have no reason to suppose anything other than that they have the same level of income, then this theory of memetics of classism and the tragedy of the commons is not supported.
Another implication is the reslut of "neighbourhoods" like rich neighborhoods and ghettoes and such. these will tend to form for the same reasons that people perceive that each other understand each other from an reciprocal altruism point of view of economics. So a franchimse trying to enter a richer or poorer neighborhood should adjust to cater to this. what does that look like, however?
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模倣子 Memetic Nexus and Memetic Orgasm
Background
I'm going to be writing a novel this November as a textbook for Macromemetics. I want to illustrate the basic principles and some of their functions in allegorical stories with a constant group of characters.
Introduction
Why do people like (to read about) sports and talk about the weather?
Is science above macromemetics? no, nature is the memetic nexus
lots of people with all the same (and immediate) memetic inventory
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模倣子 Pollution Futures
Introduction
Use the free market to allow industry to "purchase" the pollution they need from the actual people who have to put up with it. Designate "zones" where these people live and create futures markets, like on the Chicago Board of Trade, for the various types of pollution, e.g., parts per million of such-and-so contaminant, biologically available oxygen, spilled oil or coal, etc. The people living in the zones would be able to trade their "clean water and air and soil" in the form of shares, which would be determined by something like the fact that they live there, and possibly how much land they own in the zone (if they live there).
Futures Markets
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模倣子 The Female Face of Normalcy
Dig up that stuff I texted to Tiffany about this and write about how the fact that women don't fit neatly into the oppressive mold makes them an anchor point for liberation for everyone.
Women are compelling -- we feel more when they are in distress.
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模倣子 Pretending not to Understand
Pretending not to understand is another potential sub-class of immunomeme, and it may or may not be parametric as well. Given all of these immunomemes that mimic the process of intellectual discussion, i.e., questioning and answering, throwing out new ideas, having those ideas shot down (when untenable?), this brings us to the question of how does one distinguish a productive intellectual or problem-solving discussion from a pointless and self-serving immunomemtic throw-down? Being able to make this distinction is important for chairmen (1) of meetings of all sorts, even when formal controls such as Robert's Rules of Order are employed, heads of college departments, heads of engineering teams, politicians, and so forth. Such people could use an arsenal of memetic, or perhaps better described as meta-memetic tools to assess the situation and hopefully bring things back on track. This could lead to one of the highest goals of macro-memetics, i.e., to avoid conflict, even bloodshed arising from unresolveable differences.
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(1) also "chairpersons"
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模倣子 Memetic Essay
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模倣子 The Tenacity of Borrowing Cultures
Index of Memetic Materials
Introduction A fact that has long intrigued me is how "borrowing cultures", or those who have brought their culture, religion, or language from another country, tend to assiduously maintain even trivial details of this legacy, even centuries after the "home country" has abandoned them, or even if they are totally impractical in the new environment.
Another example is how minority cultures tend to become more pronounced about their culture when they find themselves among foreign cultures
Mormons anywhere outside of Utah
It occurs to me that this might have a straightforward memetic explanation.
Japanese Mormons and Coca-Cola
Greenlandish Vikings
American circumcisers
American 3-piece suits and Eurasian cattle in the desert
Canadian French
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模倣子 Lying and Memetic Hacking
Linguistic Text Analysis
https://youtu.be/H0-WkpmTPrM
