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.
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(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.
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