模倣子 Closed Memetic Pathways

 Memetic Index - Previous Essay - ChatGPT - Memetic Glossary 

Introduction

I want to follow up on some of the ideas I touched on in my previous essay about "memeplectic skin" and closed and open pathways. This is all critical, I think, to the meaningful understanding of what constitutes "inside" and "outside" of an organization or group, and how to more rigorously define what the cohort of that group might be. I introduce the fairly obvious concept of a "submemeplex" as a subset of any given memeplex, i.e., a subgroup of the members of the memeplex' (memeplectic) and a subset of the memeplectic memetic inventory.

The hypothesis is that a meaningfully distinct submemeplex has some kind of mathematically definable "skin" that might be able to be described by the relative composition of the state matrices, the pathways through these matrices (e.g., many of them may be "closed"), and there may be characteristic profiles of the immunomemetic and alliance meme distributions and densities as one approaches and passes through this skin.

One issue is assigning some kind of "dimensionality" to the N-space described by the system of state matrices that describe the submemeplex under study and the memeplex that contains it. Physical proximity of agents to one another, for example, may sometimes be relevant, but proximity, or connective density, or what-have-you, may be more so. In short, perhaps something that can define not only what the "skin" is and where, but whether one is "inside" or "outside" of it.

One thing we'd like to understand is how to penetrate the skin, as in infecting an organization from the outside (if possible) so as to change or destroy it. Does the skin even serve as "protection" for a submemeplex, as such?

Alliance-Immunomeme Symmetry Breaking and Rules

Alliance meme vs. immunomeme symmetry breaking might be related to the presence of rules. This could be related to the concept of "games" versus "free play" (1). Free play is the kind of play that young children engage in, and which may be present in activities such as lovemaking, that is, activities which involve physical/social engagement without the presence of "bullying opportunities." That is, one does not fear others telling us that we "did something wrong" or attacking us for some such reason. This is of course the very essence of any true "game."

This may have an important relationship to the importance placed by some organizations such as AA or some churches (though often more in the breach than the observance in the latter case) on "service without thought of reward" because such (volunteer) activity produces high involvement with low opportunity for (self-)criticism. This is a memetically healthy activity, and we can see how there is a symmetry breaking between activities which are purely voluntary and altruistic differ from those which are done for pay or other such rewards by the fact that there are fewer rules in the former case--the engagement with others is its own reward, so to speak.

The Problem with State-Based Definitions

It should be pretty obvious that while memetic states, as used in state transition diagrams, can be very useful for designed memetic systems, or for "debugging" or describing existing ones, usually very small subsets of them, with the purpose of reëngineeing them, they’re a fairly artifical concept when it comes to describing organic (large) memetic systems.

Why would I say this? We can observe and measure the deployment of memes by agents, but we cannot observe and measure "states" as such. States are, in a sense, the subjective impression of individual agents, in other words, each agent perceives each other agent as being in a "state" where they are likely to deploy, with differing likelihoods, various memes in a subset of each of their inventories. The accuracy of this impression is a measure of the given agents "effectiveness" as a member of the cohort, i.e., those that keep "getting it wrong" and mis-assessing and mis-predicting the actions of others are "less effective."

The probability of all memetic deployments at a given moment, i.e., in a given state, is one.

The idea of "idiostates" (5) might be useful here. Each individual perceives all of the other agents to be in one state or another, and the "crazier" states are those in which others don't know what one will do, or the menu is only "crazy" memes, or those undesirable to themselves. Smaller groups of agents could share a substate, something like where several agents being in an identifiable state, such as "united in opposition" in which everybody is waiting for the "leader" to take some action. This may look like a percolation phenomenon.

Things like laws, the police, codes of ethics, morality, privacy, schools, professions, groups, clubs, cliques, and so forth, serve to congeal and clarify the state disposition of the cohorts and subcohorts of a memetic system.

But where does that leave us with memetic pathways, and closed ones?

A closed memetic pathway may be roughly described along the lines of a series of states:

S1=>S2=>S3=>....=>Sn=>Sm=>S1

or even with branching:

S1=>S2=>S3=>[ Sa=>Sb...Sy=>Sz, Sq=>Sr...St=>Su ]=>Sn=>Sm=>S1

In order for this to work, we have to be able to say that the total probability of branches from S1 back to itself is one. If this were not the case, then there would be branches that lead outside of the system and never come back.

This suggests a "capture" phenomenon (6).

Closed Memetic Pathways

Does the immunomemetic pressure (2) intensify as one approaches the skin, which drives agents back down toward the center? What is the profile of immunomemes within a submemeplex? Does there exist a concept of "memetic tunneling" (3) where one "jumps" from inside a submemeplex to the outside, or vice-versa?

Let's think about memetic pathways. I've posited the idea of "closed memetic pathways" (4) as a way of describing the boundaries, the "skin," of submemeplexes, i.e., as a way of actually identifying a cohort and a memetic inventory of a given submemeplex, absent any clear way of a priori defining said memetic inventory or cohort. Who is inside the skin, and what do they do that "defines" them as being members of same?

It bears restating that theoretically at least an agent is predisposed, insofar as they are able to discern, deploy memes that lead to states in which they themselves are more and more able to deploy more and more impactful memes, or at least in which they perceive that more and more memes "favorable" to them will continue to be deployed.

Summary & Conclusions

The idea of closed pathways may be related to being inside of a memetic skin. What this relationship might be remains to be discovered.

One important application of this area of inquiry is developing memetic weaponry for attacking a targeted submemeplex. We cannot rely on stereotypes and contact memes to identify subcohort members, for one.

Memetic tunnelling is an interesting new concept. It may be related to memetic pressure, which is also a term I have yet to formalize. "Aggregate resonance" is another as yet murky concept which may relate to and illuminate how memetic tunneling could function, e.g., an individual may be deep within an organization (submemeplex) but could "tunnel" out if there were a sustainable position outside the cult or whatever where one still had a large memetic inventory such that total resonance with surrounding (new) individuals provided the same level of "memetic hit." This could be an efficient and low-pain approach to "exit counseling" or "deprogramming."

An important symmetry-breaking factor between immunomemes and alliance memes may be the presence of rules. This could mean things like altruistic behaviors predominate as one penetrates further under the "skin", for example.

Finally, I still need to come up with a mathematical characterization of a "skin" based on the state matrix model, and then find a way to demonstrate its validity. If a meaningful description of a submemeplectic skin can begin to be identified, then interesting conclusions may be able to be drawn from this description.

__________________________________________

(1) See my essay on "Escaping Meme Hell through Free Play"

(2) Immunomemetic pressure is a term I've not used before, as such, so may not be well-defined. Perhaps we can define it as the propensity for immunomemes to be deployed in certain states, and even if they aren't deployed, this propensity might drive agents to other state constellations where the pressure is lower. It would be interesting to see if this pressure has a consistent profile with respect to the submemeplectic skin, e.g., does it "spike" at the skin boundary, and decrease as we proceed outward? Is it low at the "center" of the submemeplex? Or does it remain high within, but there are more and more other types of memes available? Does a submemeplex look like a place where novices are expelled by immunomemetic pressure, while initiates are able to remain and thrive because they are conversant in a larger non-immunomemetic inventory that makes life in the center tolerable? Who knows at this point?

(3) As usual, quantum mechanics is useful for these explorations. I've never used the term "memetic tunneling" before, but it may prove very useful for modeling how one might dismantle dysfunctional organizations from the outside, induct individuals into healthy ones, or deprogram individuals out of bad organizations or practices. One could imagine an agent with a given memetic inventory "trapped" within a submemeplex suddenly transitioning outside of that zone into another memeplex where somehow, perhaps they have an "energy" or "probability equivalence" where their memetic inventory affords them the same resonance outside as in, possibly, and so there is no resonance (or immunomemetic) pressure to NOT make the jump. Is this in fact something that humans care about? (7) That is, that my satisfaction from memetic resonance be along an "isomeme" (8).

(4) In broad strokes, a closed memetic pathway is one that leads back to the same states, or the states within a given submemeplex, as opposed to leading out of said memeplex, and wandering around outside randomly. It could also be said that closed pathways are conservative in nature, while "open" ones tend to be "disruptive." I will try to describe this more rigorously.

(5) I've written about things like "idiomemes" (as in "idiolects")

(6) In "capturing" what is captured and by what? We like to think of an agent escaping a submemeplex, physically? mentally? Via some kind of memetic tunnelling effect? (3,7)

(7) In AA, there is the idea that one must "hit bottom" before becoming receptive to adopting the principles and 12 Steps of recovery. This could be convolved with the idea that one must be completely convinced that there is no further benefit whatever to be gleaned from one's old lifestyle, and thus one is totally open to consider other options.

(8) See this thread with ChatGPT. Here we have the idea of how memes might have the same "potential" in various states, or agents might perceive the same "total level of resonance" at different places and how they seek to climb the gradient of increasing resonance as steeply as possible. This suggests mathematically, that they would be climbing the isomemetic gradient as well, as in where memes (more memes or the same amount) would be more and more strongly shared by some number (probably fewer) individuals. "Isomeme" is a little deceptive, and I may mess with the definition more later, but it should be thought of as the predisposition of the given meme to be reliably enacted in response to stimuli. If all agents in close contact can reliably produce the meme, then it's memetic potential is high...so what does an "isomeme" mean? Is that an agent thing? All agents (on average) produce/recognize said meme with some given reliability? Isoresonance is just a distributions of environments where an agent experiences the same overall resonance, even if across different agents and/or memes. (9)

(9) Hence education is the enemy of fanaticism. If an agent has a higher and more diverse memetic inventory, then their potential for memetic tunneling may go up. By contrast, if it is low, and consists entirely of cult memes, then the memetic tunneling potential drops to zero. The trick may look something like memetic pairing the cult memetic inventory with outside memes, and also providing an intense milieu where those paired memes may be used in memetic chain reactions (memetic orgies). I think people try to remove the cult memes, which is impossible, and then begin the reeducation process. Better to expand the victim's memetic inventory via pairing, providing opportunities for connections to the outside, or better still, a memetic tunneling jump into an outside environment where they may be equally engaged.