Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
I'm trying to organize all my essays into a singular document that clearly lays out macromemetics, but there is a lot of material, and I'm not sure about the quality. Many of them are pretty well formatted, have plenty of footnotes, and include diagrams. Others not so much.
I thought I might go back to my short-lived resolution of writing a short post on macromemetics every Monday, and maybe use that format to start to put things into order. Kind of a "letters to the universe" kind of thing, I suppose.
I'll just take a stab at things. I'll try to start with the basics, the zero-assumption level of things, and build from there. I'll try to link in previous essays that support each new point. I guess I'll also go back and edit posts I've made for each Macromemetic Monday to add things like diagrams, more links, and so forth, so they actually lead to more understanding and clarification.
A Little on Micromemetics
I call my new science "macromemetics" in using the same kind of nomenclature as in economics, i.e., "microeconomics" and "macroeconomics." By this I mean that microeconomics deals with things like individual maximization of utility and individual economic decisions generally, while macroeconomics deals with things like money supply, inflation, and even supply and demand curves, in other words, phenomena that emerge from collective behavior of groups of individuals.
Macromemetics deals with individual behavior with respect to memes (1). Macromemetics deals with the behaviors of collections of individuals with respect to memes, or usually systems of memes (3).
Some Basic Concepts of Micromemetics
Individual people (4) engaging in memetic activities (5) deploy memes in the hope that they will resonate with other agents. An example is telling a joke and having other people laugh (6). If they don't laugh, then it didn't resonate, or the memetic deployment was "unsuccessful."
A good reference for micromemetics is The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.
The human brain is structured to recognize memetic deployments by other agents and decide how to react, and to assess the receptiveness of other agents to memes one might deploy oneself, and to learn how to enact memes deployed by other agents.
Memes are a kind of parasitic entities that piggyback on our ability to feel empathy for others, which is a faculty of the mirror neurons in our brains (7). We are able to watch another person doing something and work out what it would be like to do the same thing with out own bodies (or speech organs), and by the same token, guess at how they would react if we were to do the same thing.
As parasites that exist in the environment created by our mirror neurons and which may be transmitted to other individuals, memes are able to reproduce and also mutate via natural selection, much like our genes compete with each other for resources and reproductive success. This is where we start to move into the domain of macromemetics.
How memes work in the brain and human memetic behavior is pretty well established at this point and I take it as a given, a point of departure for macromemetics. A refer to micromemetic concepts throughout, but I don't so much interrogate the how the nervous system processes memes and so on, as such (8).
I have developed a collection of terms for many of these phenomena, which I have written about elsewhere, and which I'll try to build up in future Macromemetic Monday posts.
Summary
Micromemetics is to Macromemetics as microeconomics is to macroeconomics. One deals with individual behavior, and the other deals with collections of individuals.
We take as given that humans are memetic creatures with all that entails. I've devised a number of terms for micromemetic phenomena, and use those to describe situations and dynamics, develop theories, design experiments, and analyze the results. As such, I've managed to develop a number of principles, theories, and laws which can aid in memetic (social) engineering.
More to come, I hope!
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(1) I define a meme as a readily identifiable behavior or stimulus. An example could be smiling, waving, flipping someone the middle finger, words, or any language event. Some allow that familiar objects, such as a coffee cup or a telephone, can also be memes. I also class these as MIAOs (2) since they technically cannot be "imitated," only "recognized."
(2) MIAO is a "Memetic Iconic Anchoring Object" since familiar objects attach collections of memes which all become available when a MIAO (such as a coffee cup) is presented, but conflating MIAOs and memes can be a useful shorthand and avoids a certain amound of quibbling.
(3) A system of memes, or "memetic system" is also known as a "memeplex," or for very large systems, such as a language or an entire culture, which might go so far as to employ the term "megamemeplex."
(4) I do no disallow animals or AIs or even other things from engaging in memetic interactions. My general term is a "memetic agent" or "agent" and this is anybody or anything which may receive memes and in turn "send" them (5).
(5) An "agent" is anybody or anything which may engage in memetic transactions. That is, sending and receiving memes. An agent may "enact" a meme, or "deploy" a meme. The former may imply that the agent is merely "rehearsing" the meme, or "practicing," while the latter implies that the meme is being put out there for other agents to be exposed to. An agent either "resonates" or fails to resonate with a memetic deployment. Why and when and how resonance happens and what that leads to is central to macromemetics.
(6) Emotional responses such as laughing, crying, yawning, or shivering are what might be termed "biological memetic responses" or "physiological memetic responses." Orgasms are also of this type. Some of these, such as laughing, crying, or yawning, are "contagious," which is a kind of memetic resonance.
(7) This is related to Dunbar's Number.
(8) Despite not wanting to hash over how the human nervous system produces memetic behavior, I do look into the memetic relationship of the individual with him or herself, and how this relates to interacting with the outside world. I call this domain "endomemetics" and I have terms like "idiomemetics" and "idiomemes" in addition to "endomemes" and "exomemes" (generally just what we think of as "memes").
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.
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