Manga Index
2023-09-30
2023-09-29
2023-09-28
2023-09-25
模倣子 Macromemetic Monday
Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
I could develop the explanation further, but at this point it's probably most helpful to take as given that memetic agents seek to maximize resonance with fellow cohort members, rather like microeconomic agents seek to maximize utility, getting the most value for money, and also minimizing downside risk.
One implication of this is that agents deploying memes try to push the memetic fabric towards configurations which will give them greater opportunities for future deployments. Likewise, reacting agents, choosing to resonate (1) with memes deployed at them, also want to optimize their own future deployment opportunities.
How a Memetic Fabric Behaves
At this point we can start to talk about memetic states. A state is a property of a memetic fabric. It describes which agents are able to deploy which memes, and which subsequent state each possible deployment leads to.
I have developed three ways for describing the transitions of a memetic fabric:
1. State transition diagrams
2. Deployment descriptors
3. Transition matrix sets (2)
I cover all of these in my modeling of the triangle baseball model. I chose baseball with only two bases because it's familiar, and with only two bases the number of states is smaller and it's easier to elaborate all three of the state descriptions styles.
Complete Matrix Set of Triangular Baseball
What do Memetic States Look Like?
Summary
A memetic fabric has a state. That state changes with each memetic deployment. Indeed, the definition of a memetic deployment is that it changes the state of the system. The contrary to this is an unsuccessful memetic deployment, i.e., where the rest of the cohort does not recognize that a memetic deployment has taking place, e.g., a garbled word or too quiet speech or an unrecognized reference or object.
Changes in memetic state change the collection memes which agents have the opportunity to deploy. Agents deploying memes try to move the system into states which will give them more deployment opportunities in the future. Agents resonating with memes deployed at them also try to steer the system in a direction which will give them better future deployment opportunities.
Coming up soon, a look at the Three Laws of Macromemetics and the principle of immunomemes and the Three Laws of Immunomemetics.
____________________________
(1) It's something of an open question as to whether memetic resonances are conscious or subconscious or unconscious. This is an area for future research. It is probably a combination and depends on the given meme in question. This also gets into the area of immunomemes.
(2) A transition matrix set is so called because it's a system made up of state matrices of agents on one axis and the available memes on the other. If an agent is able to deploy a given meme in a given state, the matrix cell contains a link to the new state. In other words, each transition matrix is a collection of other matrices, arrayed according to agents and memetic deployment opportunities. On top of that, we think about the probability of deployment. Each non-blank cell carries a probability of that deployment happening, and the sum of all of the deployment probabilities across the entire matrix is one, obviously.
2023-09-20
漫画 Gopher-the-Juggler
2023-09-18
Nanowrimo Events in Moscow
模倣子 Macromemetic Monday
Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
Where did we get to last time? Basically, memetic agents want resonance. They want other humans to reliably react to their own memetic deployments (1). In other words, I tell a joke, I want people to laugh. I don't want them to ignore me so we can hear the crickets. I also don't want anybody to say I told a bad joke and have others agree or say nothing.
The implications for this are far-reaching, and I will explore them in many ways as we move forward.
Memetic Hubs (Nexus)
A meme is attractive if the agent considering deploying it is confident of a desirable reaction.
One way to assess this is whether there is any evidence of this meme in the rest of the cohort. Have you heard anybody talk about the meme you are considering? This brings up the idea of the memetic nexus or memetic hub (2).
Essays on Memetic Nexus:
The Memetic Nexus and the Rock Star
Memetic Nexus and Power
Mel Brooks & Constructed Memetic Nexuses
Nature as Memetic Nexus, Road Bingo
Garnering Allies
Alliances and Nexuses in Chess Model
Memetic Mutation
The brain seems to be good at determining if a given meme has mutated. For example, some joke or story is making the rounds and it's obvious that it has changed into multiple versions. The mind seems to be able to grasp that this means that it has passed through a number of minds in order to mutate into new forms. This means that a large number of other agents have been exposed to the meme.
"Pseudo-mutation" is a memetic engineering technique whereby the engineer designs multiple versions of a meme to be deployed (for marketing, political, or other purposes) to make it appear that the meme has already undergone mutation.
Pseudo-Mutation Links:
Shameless Meta-Self-Promotion
Heal Oneself, Heal the World
The final pages of The Second Coming comic book
Summary
Humans are good at assessing what kinds of reactions they can get from the things they do. They are also willing to take negative actions to receive negative reactions if that's the only choice they have. A lot of what agents use to assess whether a meme has legs or not is whether they perceive that others have been exposed to it or to have reacted to it previously.
_________________________
(1) Memetic agents want to deploy memes that resonate, that is, that do not lead to no reaction, or alienation. Alienation is a fate worse than death for an agent. The other, less bad, outcome is "bullying" or immunomemetic deployment. I'll get into that later when I come to the conservative nature of memeplexes and how immunomemeplexes are involved, which is about the Three Laws of Immunomemetics.
(2) A memetic nexus or memetic hub is a configuration in which one agent, or other source of mems is subscribed to by some collection of agents such that they all receive fresh memes at the same time. Examples are the news, weather, sports, gossip, etc. The idea is that all subscribing agents have the same new information, so that any memes they deploy will resonate with the others.
2023-09-15
SIgns of the Times
2023-09-14
2023-09-13
2023-09-12
2023-09-11
Futurama Polyamory
模倣子 Macromemetic Monday
Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
2023-09-09
漫画 Louise & Achresis in the Woods
Manga Index
I drew this at MosCon Revival 2023!
2023-09-08
2023-09-06
模倣子 Essays in Progress
Table 1. The Three Laws of Macromemetics1. An agent deploys memes in order to achieve optimal resonance2. Deployment of a meme causes transition to a new state3. A mutation is a Modification, Addition, or Deletion of a State, an Agent, or a Meme (MADSAM)
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"
Introduction
MIAO 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.
__________________________________________
(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.
___________________________________________
模倣子 Memetic Essay
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
Introduction
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.
link the the cheese-dick essay on the imaginary other
[on a doode modeling for an art class and for medical students]
What 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"?
Overview
Happy 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.
gender of child
"Do you want room?"(2)
coffee
"I forgot to check."
TP in the bog
"awesome"
"sucks"
_________________________________
(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?!!
She might look up Tim Wise, by the way.
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.
_________________________________________________________
(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
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).
"... 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..."
I'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...
Foreword
I 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.
- to Live
- to Love and Be Loved
- to Feel Important
- Variety
The 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.
_________________________________
(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."
Introduction
Is 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?
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]
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."
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
Introduction
The 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.
Discussion
I 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?
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
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
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.
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.
____________________________________________
(1) also "chairpersons"
_________________________________________
模倣子 Memetic Essay
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