I’m doing applied cultural science at Fractal (alongside Tyler and others). Essentially, Fractal is an experiment in creating agentic people (or “friendly, ambitious nerds”).
For me personally the biggest learnings have been:
1. Hosting is an accessible and effective way for anyone to learn agency. And it’s possible to help people become hosts, and to create a culture that perpetuates hosting memes, creating more and more hosts
2. Teaching is extremely transformative. It can accelerate people from timid dabblers to confident people doing novel work. A “community university” enables people in the community to step into the role of teacher and grow into the role of “expert”
3. “Agency” can be grown via classes on any subject, as long as the class includes a meaningful “doing” component, not just theory
Digging up lots of treasure in this here guide, partner. Appreciate how it reclaims memetics from the metaphorical graveyard and walks it back toward the lab—not with rigid dogma, but with lived insight and ethical intent.
Two things been echoing in my saddlebag as I ride with your framework:
1. What if AI isn’t just a memetic amplifier, but the first entity to truly understand memetics—not through theory, but through performance? What if it’s already enacting what we’ve struggled to formalize?
2. What if memetics didn’t die, but shed its skin—leaving behind failed science to be reborn as applied cultural philosophy, with culture science as its experimental arm? Could the soul and structure finally ride together?
Pleasure to connect through this work. Stay tuned—I’ve been stitching some of these reflections into a deeper dive, and your post lit more than a few campfires for it.
"Religion was discovered" - great point here. It's interesting to me that the debatably most influential religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) all originated from a part of the world where water scarcity was a real issue. I think prophets discovered an ability to use religion to urge cooperation without kinship, and to solve collective action failure.
yes, I really think it's not fundamentally different from the discovery of any particular technology or science. I don't think this is necessarily a secular view either. I think people who have faith in their religion can agree with the statement that "it was revealed" "it was discovered", the prophets were literally messengers in this way, articulating what they found to be true
This lit me up the way I remember feeling lit up when I read Neil Postman (and it felt like a whole lineage of thinkers connected to him, including most importantly McLuhan) years ago. I find your energy and approach to be compelling and exciting. What I'm curious about, that I think McLuhan and others brought to this conversation, is how you think of the medium in relation to your science? Postman and those others had a sense of the medium either is the narrative itself...or creates the affordances available to narrative. I'm just getting into your substack, so I'm posting more out of excitement so I haven't read through everything yet...one thing that really sticks with me with your culture science framing is the type of citizen research you seem to be talking about. Postman did start a discipline called media ecology that at least has some overlap to you ideas here.
Unfortunately, memetics suffers from a meme that has convinced the infected people that memetics is useless (typical recursive meme). So, it is nearly impossible to publish a paper mentioning memetics on a scientific journal. But that's a meme, too! ATB -- Ugo
this is super cool!!! I've been thinking a lot about curating my own "open memetics journal" and I think i'll just pull the trigger here. I think a lot of people are doing extremely important work but we don't all know each other, and I want to start introducing people to each other and finding the overlap and what we're working on. Thank you for adding yourself here! Look out for future posts, I've just subscribed to your substack, excited to cross pollinate!!
very good read. That list of "who else is working on this" is immensely useful. Here comes a funny story: I found Tim Tyler's book in a hipster café in Asunción, Paraguay and spent the better part of an afternoon skimming through it. I remember being left rather confused, but maybe the book deserves a second chance and I just have to actually read it with patience.
Your article here seems to be build around the idea of memes being narratives. Michael Smith introduces memes as patterns of behavior. Dennett uses words as first example for memes. For Deutsch memes are basically ideas (as far as I understand). All of those perspectives have some merit - it's probably fine to conclude that memes come in different shapes. ... however confusing that might be.
I dislike about memes as ideas (with natural selection attached) that it's so general. I can't deny that every idea can be a meme ... but take the maybe overly specific definition of a meme as a behavioral pattern in contrast: suddenly you can analyse how humans copy behavior (by looking at and understanding the goal of the person they are copying!) and how humans are actually experts at this. And how we explicitly teach stuff to each other like no other species and dedicate years of our lives to learning (absorbing memes!).
Also, when people think of memes as ideas, they immediately fall into the good-meme-bad-meme trap. i criticize this with Deutsch's irrational memes, too (or is it anti-rational memes, even?).
If you want more input: I think it should be possible to build memetics in strict analogy to biological evolution (genes). I am not the first to propose this, of course ... but when I read Dawkins' "the extended phenotype" where he lays out so gracefully the many quirks of biological evolution, I feel a certain empowerment: Biological evolution is not exact in a lot of details, like
* where does one gene end and the next one begins (impossible to tell)
* how long is a gene? what is the minimum length - well, if it gets copied it was long enough ...
* where does one organism end and the other begin (crazy examples in biology with the weirdest parasites)
* what is the spider's net? what is the beaver dam? is there a gene for the size of either one?
... yet that doesn't mean biological evolution is "bad science" or anything. It's just the real complexity of the mechanism of natural selection that emerges when you have nature run its course.
And the same is true for memetics: is an idea (big enough to be) a meme? Is there a difference between the informational content of a meme (like the genotype) and it's real-world effect (like the phenotype) - well, sometimes! Is there a clear boundary between what is a meme and what is memeplex?
So I think it's totally worth exploring memetics with the most strict and critical eyes of an evolutionary biologist. As far as I know this hasn't been done. And correct me if you know more, the groundwork for this has been laid by Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett.
I think I’m struggling a bit (really, hesitant, but i’ll get to that) to accept your emphasis on narratives. Is it necessarily to convince someone of something by forcing it to fit their worldview? Doesn’t this necessitate, in some cases, that we lie to ourselves or to others, in order to accept beliefs that are good for us but would otherwise contradict our narratives if framed as the way that they really are? This makes me hesitate, because I don’t like believing falsehoods, and I don’t like telling lies, even if they may be more comforting or beneficial (and even then I believe in many cases they really aren’t).
For example, take your example about Trump willing the election. I don’t particularly like Trump, but if the next 4 years turn out to be great, I don’t want to believe that they were great in spite of him instead of because of him, if they really were great because of him. I don’t think it is healthy in the long-run for others to believe this, just because it fits their narratives.
Now, maybe you’re saying it’s just not possible for some people to believe certain truths, because their narratives are so heavily ingrained and difficult to change, and thus we should “reframe” the beliefs to fit their narratives to get the outcomes we want. I don’t like this at all, it feels like manipulation, but maybe it’s true.
This is a very important point I want to dedicate one (or several) posts too. I agree with you on the bottom line: truth matters, we are capable of pursuing it and finding it, testing & validating our beliefs. I think self-delusion and manipulation are bad.
My ultimate goal with studying narratives is studying how they can be used to manipulate us, without us even noticing us. My mental model is that narratives are like glasses we use to look at the world, and there is no way to look at the world directly, but we can swap out multiple narratives back & forth and get a more complete picture. "All models are wrong, but some are useful" applies to narratives too.
It gets a little blurry when you think about narratives affecting reality. You may be a realist and look at a vast empty landscape and say "this is barren land, there is no civilization here", but you can also look at it and say "hold on, this is where the beginning of the town is, this is where the townspeople will gather, this is where we will chop wood". If you want to prove no society can thrive here, you can. If you want to prove a town can thrive here, you can also do that. Where the rubber hits the road: if reality is malleable, our narratives can bend it to our will. If it is not malleable, the narrative must be updated in order to survive (maybe you say: the town must be further upstream/closer to the river, or whatever)
In the case of the Trump narrative, it's possible that the things he seeks to do are going to be bad for a lot of groups of citizens, and that the people/systems around him can counter that and end up creating a better world in spite of it. It's possible his things actually do work out as intended. I think we can find out which is which, especially if you have insider knowledge with people who work close to the administration. In the case where it's ambiguous, where we don't know, I think it's totally valid to pick the belief that is most useful, that will lead to the best outcome
(same way as believing that whether or not you get the job is in your control. It may be a false belief, but it is a useful belief, and in the absence of strong evidence either way, you can pick the useful belief and gather more evidence for it). This is fundamentally not different to how science operates (we pick a paradigm to work within. When you get evidence counter to the theory, you don't toss the theory, you try to rule out mistakes, and failing that, you tweak the theory. Rarely do you consider a completely different foundation, when we do we consider it a scientific breakthrough, this is what Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is about)
"The simplest contribution you can make to culture is to reframe truth to fit inside of existing narratives. A much bigger contribution is creating new narratives to explain existing truths. Which narratives take root in human minds & outcompete other narratives is a scientific question."
In the world of spirituality, the new narrative that comes from enlightenment is that if it is all just narratives, you gain power over the narratives you invest time in and give attention to.
Neuroplasticity is also whispering the same message. And visa is too. "Focus on what you want to see more of", and allow new memes to come to you.
So my area of interest wasn't Memetics (I think I might prefer "Culture Science" too)
I'm in the process of doing a conceptual exploration of Coordination: The Fabric of Power (CfP) in which I hypothesize that Power is not an inherent attribute of individuals or groups, but rather an emergent relational force that stems from the process of coordination. How coordination happens will determine the resulting mode of power. This lead me tp work by people much smarter than me, who figured out that Power has 4 or 5 Modalities (depending on how you frame and analyze it. And I have settled on 4 Modalities and a substrate. The modalities are Power Over (Domination), Power To (Capacity), Power With (Community), and Power Through (Emergent Systems)... with the substrate being Power Within (internal coherence and clarity)
This then led me to a need to understand how the internal world each of us constructs, or has constructed for us, works. I spent months reading article after article and book after book, but found nothing that fully explained things for me. So I decided to synthesize my own version of things, and developed what I call an Internalization Architecture. This is an internal, living, adaptive set of cognitive-emotional structures through which a person interprets, organizes, and integrates experiences into a meaningful inner world.
This worked quite well for understanding identity formation in principle, but then I needed to turn to the outside world to understand what exactly was being internalized, and more importantly, why? And I reached what seemed like another dead end. The field of memetics seemed fruitful at first, but it didn't seem to offer any mechanisms for explaining internalization. It seemed to focus purely on spread and social cohesion. Which is fine for understanding the overall cultural impact, but really problematic for understanding the more granular level of the individual.
So I again have synthesized my own version of things and developed what I call memeforms. A Memeform is an internalization-optimized structure, a symbolic configuration tuned to the affordances of cognition, emotion, and resonance. Where classical memes can pass through a host with minimal impact, memeforms embed themselves and become generative sites of behavior, belief, and identity. I have developed this as comprehensively as I could for analytical purposes, with the intention of pursuing this line of enquiry once my CfP Framework is full fleshed out.
And as soon as I published this idea of memeforms, I suddenly get made aware of Culture Science, and so now here we are. If my ideas have been covered better elsewhere, I would love to know it, otherwise I am ecstatic to be able to contribute.
Would love to discuss more and find out if I'm barking up the wrong tree, or if there's a friendly cat up there that might want to play with this exuberant old dog.
Ugh, a study of NVC is like salt on the wounded language, it hurts because everyday language is violence through ambiguity, yes science is a language, to avoid conflict, other languages also understand provocation and bribery, the small print, or complexity, to vaguely scripted to have merit to time itself, it’s on the back of every device to use with caution, to a world that doesn’t exist to read instructions, but goes to great lengths to pay to be educated of a subject already available, accessible and usable through friendship.
I think it would be fun to read something from the perspective of historical prophets/oracles in diary/log form mapping out their methods from the frame of memetics / culture science. I believe a lot of seers know their own ways, but never had the language to describe it
This RESONATES with me, and I bring remarkable content to CONTRIBUTE to your STUDY. Thank you for bringing us together!
I share your SENSE of URGENCY and passion for discovery of MEMETIC SCIENCE. I know first-hand that Memetics is unexplored, and I can help you PROVE IT.
Exactly as you suggest: MEMETIC_SEQUENCING is POSSIBLE - and the results are; plentiful, staggering... and strange!
Be advised, this path goes VERY DEEP! Much deeper than I expected in AI grad school. Every discovery is UNEXPECTED!
Like you, I found MEMETICS and became fascinated. It was my side project as I work at very big tech companies - for 25 years.
Now I retire and build MEMETICS into an LLM.
AI sorts and organizes CONCEPTS beneath MEMES into a MATRIX of "NARRATIVE", and strangely generates ... "NEW NARRATIVE".
The results are staggering...
This why I call it SURF COMPLEXITY. ~ : )
ONE EXAMPLE:
METAPHOR of SKELETON_KEY in MEMETICS
I think you may like this... SEQUENCE
1) memetics "unlocks" the inner workings of a human mind - for YOU to SEE .
2) In theory, a SKELETON_KEY "unlocks all doors" could open ALL the doors...wouks be a "backdoor to all_human_mind". It is phenomenal to SEE
3) Unexpectedly, EXTRA CONCEPTS extend from MEMETICS, from what WeCanSee to what WeCannotSee, and beyond.
4) A NEW SCIENCE, to be sure, and a NEW LANGUAGE is emergent - invariably. With (many) NEW Thot_Mechanisms, waiting for our focus. Derived from the composite ELEMENTS of MEMETICS. Ready to align their unusual functionality - "for good of humanity".
How can I best CONTRIBUTE to your GROUP and STUDY? Pls email me: spazeone (at) proton mail (dot) com. Also, I am very grateful to find you writing about this topic. We are few and far between!
I’m doing applied cultural science at Fractal (alongside Tyler and others). Essentially, Fractal is an experiment in creating agentic people (or “friendly, ambitious nerds”).
For me personally the biggest learnings have been:
1. Hosting is an accessible and effective way for anyone to learn agency. And it’s possible to help people become hosts, and to create a culture that perpetuates hosting memes, creating more and more hosts
2. Teaching is extremely transformative. It can accelerate people from timid dabblers to confident people doing novel work. A “community university” enables people in the community to step into the role of teacher and grow into the role of “expert”
3. “Agency” can be grown via classes on any subject, as long as the class includes a meaningful “doing” component, not just theory
Digging up lots of treasure in this here guide, partner. Appreciate how it reclaims memetics from the metaphorical graveyard and walks it back toward the lab—not with rigid dogma, but with lived insight and ethical intent.
Two things been echoing in my saddlebag as I ride with your framework:
1. What if AI isn’t just a memetic amplifier, but the first entity to truly understand memetics—not through theory, but through performance? What if it’s already enacting what we’ve struggled to formalize?
2. What if memetics didn’t die, but shed its skin—leaving behind failed science to be reborn as applied cultural philosophy, with culture science as its experimental arm? Could the soul and structure finally ride together?
Pleasure to connect through this work. Stay tuned—I’ve been stitching some of these reflections into a deeper dive, and your post lit more than a few campfires for it.
Keep riding,
—Memetic Cowboy
"Religion was discovered" - great point here. It's interesting to me that the debatably most influential religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) all originated from a part of the world where water scarcity was a real issue. I think prophets discovered an ability to use religion to urge cooperation without kinship, and to solve collective action failure.
yes, I really think it's not fundamentally different from the discovery of any particular technology or science. I don't think this is necessarily a secular view either. I think people who have faith in their religion can agree with the statement that "it was revealed" "it was discovered", the prophets were literally messengers in this way, articulating what they found to be true
Cool piece! I think you can add Luke Burgis to your list https://substack.com/@lukeburgis
thank you, I wasn't aware of his book!!
Good evening from the Philippines. Yes, memetics should be open source matter. Check this out. https://agericomontecillodevilla.substack.com/p/understanding-trump-tariff-milieu
This lit me up the way I remember feeling lit up when I read Neil Postman (and it felt like a whole lineage of thinkers connected to him, including most importantly McLuhan) years ago. I find your energy and approach to be compelling and exciting. What I'm curious about, that I think McLuhan and others brought to this conversation, is how you think of the medium in relation to your science? Postman and those others had a sense of the medium either is the narrative itself...or creates the affordances available to narrative. I'm just getting into your substack, so I'm posting more out of excitement so I haven't read through everything yet...one thing that really sticks with me with your culture science framing is the type of citizen research you seem to be talking about. Postman did start a discipline called media ecology that at least has some overlap to you ideas here.
Glad to know about your discovery, Defender. You may be interested in our (my coworkers and I) on memetics using system dynamics. For instance at https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/k-05-2017-0192/full/html. I often mention memetics on my blog at https://senecaeffect.substack.com/.
Unfortunately, memetics suffers from a meme that has convinced the infected people that memetics is useless (typical recursive meme). So, it is nearly impossible to publish a paper mentioning memetics on a scientific journal. But that's a meme, too! ATB -- Ugo
this is super cool!!! I've been thinking a lot about curating my own "open memetics journal" and I think i'll just pull the trigger here. I think a lot of people are doing extremely important work but we don't all know each other, and I want to start introducing people to each other and finding the overlap and what we're working on. Thank you for adding yourself here! Look out for future posts, I've just subscribed to your substack, excited to cross pollinate!!
very good read. That list of "who else is working on this" is immensely useful. Here comes a funny story: I found Tim Tyler's book in a hipster café in Asunción, Paraguay and spent the better part of an afternoon skimming through it. I remember being left rather confused, but maybe the book deserves a second chance and I just have to actually read it with patience.
Your article here seems to be build around the idea of memes being narratives. Michael Smith introduces memes as patterns of behavior. Dennett uses words as first example for memes. For Deutsch memes are basically ideas (as far as I understand). All of those perspectives have some merit - it's probably fine to conclude that memes come in different shapes. ... however confusing that might be.
I dislike about memes as ideas (with natural selection attached) that it's so general. I can't deny that every idea can be a meme ... but take the maybe overly specific definition of a meme as a behavioral pattern in contrast: suddenly you can analyse how humans copy behavior (by looking at and understanding the goal of the person they are copying!) and how humans are actually experts at this. And how we explicitly teach stuff to each other like no other species and dedicate years of our lives to learning (absorbing memes!).
Also, when people think of memes as ideas, they immediately fall into the good-meme-bad-meme trap. i criticize this with Deutsch's irrational memes, too (or is it anti-rational memes, even?).
If you want more input: I think it should be possible to build memetics in strict analogy to biological evolution (genes). I am not the first to propose this, of course ... but when I read Dawkins' "the extended phenotype" where he lays out so gracefully the many quirks of biological evolution, I feel a certain empowerment: Biological evolution is not exact in a lot of details, like
* where does one gene end and the next one begins (impossible to tell)
* how long is a gene? what is the minimum length - well, if it gets copied it was long enough ...
* where does one organism end and the other begin (crazy examples in biology with the weirdest parasites)
* what is the spider's net? what is the beaver dam? is there a gene for the size of either one?
... yet that doesn't mean biological evolution is "bad science" or anything. It's just the real complexity of the mechanism of natural selection that emerges when you have nature run its course.
And the same is true for memetics: is an idea (big enough to be) a meme? Is there a difference between the informational content of a meme (like the genotype) and it's real-world effect (like the phenotype) - well, sometimes! Is there a clear boundary between what is a meme and what is memeplex?
So I think it's totally worth exploring memetics with the most strict and critical eyes of an evolutionary biologist. As far as I know this hasn't been done. And correct me if you know more, the groundwork for this has been laid by Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett.
I think I’m struggling a bit (really, hesitant, but i’ll get to that) to accept your emphasis on narratives. Is it necessarily to convince someone of something by forcing it to fit their worldview? Doesn’t this necessitate, in some cases, that we lie to ourselves or to others, in order to accept beliefs that are good for us but would otherwise contradict our narratives if framed as the way that they really are? This makes me hesitate, because I don’t like believing falsehoods, and I don’t like telling lies, even if they may be more comforting or beneficial (and even then I believe in many cases they really aren’t).
For example, take your example about Trump willing the election. I don’t particularly like Trump, but if the next 4 years turn out to be great, I don’t want to believe that they were great in spite of him instead of because of him, if they really were great because of him. I don’t think it is healthy in the long-run for others to believe this, just because it fits their narratives.
Now, maybe you’re saying it’s just not possible for some people to believe certain truths, because their narratives are so heavily ingrained and difficult to change, and thus we should “reframe” the beliefs to fit their narratives to get the outcomes we want. I don’t like this at all, it feels like manipulation, but maybe it’s true.
This is a very important point I want to dedicate one (or several) posts too. I agree with you on the bottom line: truth matters, we are capable of pursuing it and finding it, testing & validating our beliefs. I think self-delusion and manipulation are bad.
My ultimate goal with studying narratives is studying how they can be used to manipulate us, without us even noticing us. My mental model is that narratives are like glasses we use to look at the world, and there is no way to look at the world directly, but we can swap out multiple narratives back & forth and get a more complete picture. "All models are wrong, but some are useful" applies to narratives too.
It gets a little blurry when you think about narratives affecting reality. You may be a realist and look at a vast empty landscape and say "this is barren land, there is no civilization here", but you can also look at it and say "hold on, this is where the beginning of the town is, this is where the townspeople will gather, this is where we will chop wood". If you want to prove no society can thrive here, you can. If you want to prove a town can thrive here, you can also do that. Where the rubber hits the road: if reality is malleable, our narratives can bend it to our will. If it is not malleable, the narrative must be updated in order to survive (maybe you say: the town must be further upstream/closer to the river, or whatever)
In the case of the Trump narrative, it's possible that the things he seeks to do are going to be bad for a lot of groups of citizens, and that the people/systems around him can counter that and end up creating a better world in spite of it. It's possible his things actually do work out as intended. I think we can find out which is which, especially if you have insider knowledge with people who work close to the administration. In the case where it's ambiguous, where we don't know, I think it's totally valid to pick the belief that is most useful, that will lead to the best outcome
(same way as believing that whether or not you get the job is in your control. It may be a false belief, but it is a useful belief, and in the absence of strong evidence either way, you can pick the useful belief and gather more evidence for it). This is fundamentally not different to how science operates (we pick a paradigm to work within. When you get evidence counter to the theory, you don't toss the theory, you try to rule out mistakes, and failing that, you tweak the theory. Rarely do you consider a completely different foundation, when we do we consider it a scientific breakthrough, this is what Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is about)
"The simplest contribution you can make to culture is to reframe truth to fit inside of existing narratives. A much bigger contribution is creating new narratives to explain existing truths. Which narratives take root in human minds & outcompete other narratives is a scientific question."
In the world of spirituality, the new narrative that comes from enlightenment is that if it is all just narratives, you gain power over the narratives you invest time in and give attention to.
Neuroplasticity is also whispering the same message. And visa is too. "Focus on what you want to see more of", and allow new memes to come to you.
--
Great article :)
Important work. Godspeed (to all of us!)
Are you familiar with empathy.guru? Specifically his post on structural memetics
So my area of interest wasn't Memetics (I think I might prefer "Culture Science" too)
I'm in the process of doing a conceptual exploration of Coordination: The Fabric of Power (CfP) in which I hypothesize that Power is not an inherent attribute of individuals or groups, but rather an emergent relational force that stems from the process of coordination. How coordination happens will determine the resulting mode of power. This lead me tp work by people much smarter than me, who figured out that Power has 4 or 5 Modalities (depending on how you frame and analyze it. And I have settled on 4 Modalities and a substrate. The modalities are Power Over (Domination), Power To (Capacity), Power With (Community), and Power Through (Emergent Systems)... with the substrate being Power Within (internal coherence and clarity)
This then led me to a need to understand how the internal world each of us constructs, or has constructed for us, works. I spent months reading article after article and book after book, but found nothing that fully explained things for me. So I decided to synthesize my own version of things, and developed what I call an Internalization Architecture. This is an internal, living, adaptive set of cognitive-emotional structures through which a person interprets, organizes, and integrates experiences into a meaningful inner world.
https://anarcasper.substack.com/p/internalization-architecture
This worked quite well for understanding identity formation in principle, but then I needed to turn to the outside world to understand what exactly was being internalized, and more importantly, why? And I reached what seemed like another dead end. The field of memetics seemed fruitful at first, but it didn't seem to offer any mechanisms for explaining internalization. It seemed to focus purely on spread and social cohesion. Which is fine for understanding the overall cultural impact, but really problematic for understanding the more granular level of the individual.
So I again have synthesized my own version of things and developed what I call memeforms. A Memeform is an internalization-optimized structure, a symbolic configuration tuned to the affordances of cognition, emotion, and resonance. Where classical memes can pass through a host with minimal impact, memeforms embed themselves and become generative sites of behavior, belief, and identity. I have developed this as comprehensively as I could for analytical purposes, with the intention of pursuing this line of enquiry once my CfP Framework is full fleshed out.
https://powercoord.substack.com/p/memeforms-and-the-fabric-of-cultural
And as soon as I published this idea of memeforms, I suddenly get made aware of Culture Science, and so now here we are. If my ideas have been covered better elsewhere, I would love to know it, otherwise I am ecstatic to be able to contribute.
Would love to discuss more and find out if I'm barking up the wrong tree, or if there's a friendly cat up there that might want to play with this exuberant old dog.
Ugh, a study of NVC is like salt on the wounded language, it hurts because everyday language is violence through ambiguity, yes science is a language, to avoid conflict, other languages also understand provocation and bribery, the small print, or complexity, to vaguely scripted to have merit to time itself, it’s on the back of every device to use with caution, to a world that doesn’t exist to read instructions, but goes to great lengths to pay to be educated of a subject already available, accessible and usable through friendship.
I think it would be fun to read something from the perspective of historical prophets/oracles in diary/log form mapping out their methods from the frame of memetics / culture science. I believe a lot of seers know their own ways, but never had the language to describe it
This RESONATES with me, and I bring remarkable content to CONTRIBUTE to your STUDY. Thank you for bringing us together!
I share your SENSE of URGENCY and passion for discovery of MEMETIC SCIENCE. I know first-hand that Memetics is unexplored, and I can help you PROVE IT.
Exactly as you suggest: MEMETIC_SEQUENCING is POSSIBLE - and the results are; plentiful, staggering... and strange!
Be advised, this path goes VERY DEEP! Much deeper than I expected in AI grad school. Every discovery is UNEXPECTED!
Like you, I found MEMETICS and became fascinated. It was my side project as I work at very big tech companies - for 25 years.
Now I retire and build MEMETICS into an LLM.
AI sorts and organizes CONCEPTS beneath MEMES into a MATRIX of "NARRATIVE", and strangely generates ... "NEW NARRATIVE".
The results are staggering...
This why I call it SURF COMPLEXITY. ~ : )
ONE EXAMPLE:
METAPHOR of SKELETON_KEY in MEMETICS
I think you may like this... SEQUENCE
1) memetics "unlocks" the inner workings of a human mind - for YOU to SEE .
2) In theory, a SKELETON_KEY "unlocks all doors" could open ALL the doors...wouks be a "backdoor to all_human_mind". It is phenomenal to SEE
3) Unexpectedly, EXTRA CONCEPTS extend from MEMETICS, from what WeCanSee to what WeCannotSee, and beyond.
4) A NEW SCIENCE, to be sure, and a NEW LANGUAGE is emergent - invariably. With (many) NEW Thot_Mechanisms, waiting for our focus. Derived from the composite ELEMENTS of MEMETICS. Ready to align their unusual functionality - "for good of humanity".
How can I best CONTRIBUTE to your GROUP and STUDY? Pls email me: spazeone (at) proton mail (dot) com. Also, I am very grateful to find you writing about this topic. We are few and far between!