模倣子 Macromemetic Monday

Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index 

Introduction 

I mentioned last time that memetic systems are conservative. This should be fairly obvious from any number of real world examples. I hope to show mechanisms in macromemetics why this should be so. Examples include language and culture. English-speaking Americans don't all wake up one day suddenly speaking different languages, like French or Japanese, or some gibberish such that they cannot speak to one another. Likewise, cultures persist, although they may evolve over time. Members of a culture expect to continually be able to use the same cultural references with their fellow culture members.

So far I have not explicitly mentioned ways in which such systems resist changes. The first law of macromemetics suggests that conservatism makes it easier for agents to optimize resonance.

Keeping Things on Track 

How do things get off track? If an agent deploys memes that push the system into a direction that makes fewer, not more, memes available to the rest of the cohort, then those other members are motivated to resist these deployments. But what can this look like?

First off, such "deviant" deployments push the system into states where less-deployed memes live. Resisting such transitions ultimately leads to such memes atrophying, being replaced by other memes, or more mainstreams getting deployed.

A New Kind of Meme

All memes are effectively the same, but it's sometimes useful to put memes into subclasses. One useful such distinction is the immunomeme. An immunomeme is one whose main function is to prevent the transition into a given state and to instead transition to another state.

The three laws of immunomemetics are as follows:

1. Any stable memeplex contains an immunomemeplex
2. A system of rules and laws is equivalent to a collection of bullying behaviors
3. The function of an immunomeme is to deter mutations to a memeplex

Immunomemes have some special properties. A big one is "unassailability." For example, saying something like "That's a dumb idea," or "That's [communism, misogyny, unamerican, etc.]" or "I'll give you lots of money if you do what I ask."

Intro to Macromemetics

Why do Jerks Get Ahead?

The Rôle of Bullying in Immunuomemetics

Socially-Sanctioned Bullying Opportunities and Immunomemes

Box-Binning

What do Memetic States Look Like?

Summary 

It's useful to take a separate look at a class of memes called immunomemes, so called because the immunize the memetic fabric against change.

There may be a blurring between a memeplex, a memetic fabric, and a memetic system. They are kind of the same thing. I tend to think of a memeplex as a snapshot of the system and the memetic fabric as the system in motion, and the memetic system as encompassing either or both. The cohort is connected to the fabric, the inventory of the cohort is the collection of memes which may be reasonably used by anybody, even though agents in the cohort may have more memes in their own inventories, and they may be members of other cohorts and memetic fabrics.

We'll see how immunomemes, and also alliance memes, which we'll also dig into, control the state of memetic systems, and the effect is conservative, i.e., curtailing the changes in the deployment opportunities of the agents in the cohort of the memetic fabric.