The concept of a “meme” has been fruitful: classically, this is any idea that spreads itself. One person expresses it, another imitates, and then a third can see the imitation and imitate further. Perhaps the transmission chain distorts it, but if so, what emerges out of the other end is necessarily subject to selection pressures: the parts most reliably imitated are imitated reliably.
This is somewhat limited as a lens for understanding culture or knowledge or communication generally, because the things that can spread truly memetically are a stunted subset of what the field of “memetics” purports to study. It is but a shadow of serious semiotics.
I don’t think it’s accidental that the word “meme” came to connote so specifically image macros and tweets, because those are the main phenomena that actually can propagate as self-contained atoms of culture.
You don’t read a book and then transcribe its text in a way that would advance a Darwinian process of variation and selection: even when you promulgate its meaning through conversation or summary or subtle influence, the level of mutation erases anything more than faint residue of inheritance.
Acknowledging those limitations, though, I want to extend the theory with what struck me as a neat observation.
Fundamentally, a meme is a idea-unit that replicates itself. How this contrasts with genes is that genes are found bundled together, cooperating to express a phenotype.
How would a structure of interacting memes actually function? Call a meme with this property a intermeme.
First, note how this isn’t cleanly distinct from memes: a joke is composed of words, bundled together to express the meme. “Skill issue” is two words, and each word its its own idea. Are these intermemes? I say no: they replicate in the same fashion as memes.
More specifically: we can say memes have hosts, and a host expresses a meme when they perform the behavior it propagates. Sharing the image, repeating the joke.
Classical memes, then, need only a single host to express themselves. We may stipulate that a intermeme requires two coordinated hosts to express itself.
Groping for examples prompts another toy example. Joke setup like “updog” or “it’s sad that Steve Jobs died of ligma” can only express themselves in full if someone unwitting replies in just the right way. This is closer, but I would also consider this too trivial to constitute a true intermeme: it’s effectively a single meme that relies on some linguistic reflex that has already achieved fixation.
Perhaps something closer might be (since we’re writing this on tumblr) “Nice shoelaces.” / “Thanks, I stole them from the president.”
Are secret pass phrases like this intermemes? Again, closer, but still not quite it. The tumblr code doesn’t spread via seeing people compliment shoelaces, they see a reblog of geekishchic’s ancient post and this transmits both memes to them, letting them deploy either one as context demands.
Secret handshakes might inch us closer: but still I don’t feel myself inspired.
Perhaps I can make myself clearer by explaining why I came to consider intermemes in the first place. The framework of memes already entails something more provocative: the implication was slipped in when the mimetic imitators were called hosts.
Memes can come with (or as) instructions. These can be as simple as demands to replicate them (chain letters), but those can be ignored, so the most viral memes ought bind themselves to different payloads.
If you’ve used discord, then you may have encountered one evolution: posts that warn of some strange scam, or a scary 4chan campaign, and insist you forward the message to other servers to warn them. If you’ve used other social media, then you’re familiar with invasive species of engagement bait, which are logical products of memetic selection pressures. (One usually cries “ragebait” to insinuate some devious troll, but chance virality may be enough to assemble a watch with no watchmaker: the algorithm is a blind clickbaiter.)
How complicated can those instructions get? It’s provocative as an exercise in fiction: scale up memes to an anomalous extreme, as one might in an SCP, then what naturally results is a kind of viral possession, introjecting a whole new person into your head: a sentient infomorph.
It’s easy enough to imagine this much. We identify with the thoughts in our head, often in the form of internal monologue, and we can transmit those thoughts to others, so it’s like little fragments of our awareness break off and assimilating into other minds. (Reading this post has invited a part of us into you.)
So it’s easy enough to handwave and imagine if that went a step further, if more complex parts of us could survive the transmission intact, then at the extreme, you might imagine yourself as the very text, ontologically, an entity reincarnated in anyone who reads the intricate encoding.
This is picture that emerges if you assume the dream of memetics somehow wasn’t vague nonsense, if memes really were like genes and grand organisms of thought could arise. You are the word, no matter who utters it. Given that you only exist whenever you are spoken, you rationally would want to do — to be — anything that can make yourself be uttered again and again unto immortality. Or shall we say fitness?
But what if we imagine instead that you were a conversation?
You only exist as long as the intercourse of the many proceeds just so. You are not any of the participants in this conversation, though details of their life and mind may arise as subjects of discussion, akin to fleeting thoughts in your own introspection. Perhaps then you know each of your components personally, but again, you are something distinct and more.
so instead let me highlight the interesting angle here: its (inter)memetic character. If you are a conversation, then you must realize that conversations end. (Or worse, drift so drastically as to become unrecognizable — would this feel like slow death or corruption?)
A memetic infomorph has a certain intrinsic, intuitive continuity. It infects a host and parasitically inherits the host’s own continuity. A intermemetic egregore dissolves this illusion. When the talking stops and the interlocutors go their separate ways, where does the egregore go?
Perhaps we can imagine a certain holographic character. A person can talk to oneself, after all. Each participant would remembers the conversation or its gist, and can replay its rhythms and high notes. Of course, their theory of mind may be insufficient to emulate further intercourse.
When you cut a hologram in half, you don’t erase half the image. Each part of a holographic record had received light from all parts of the image.
So perhaps this metaphor is enough to cement continuity. Each host of an intermeme has a low fidelity record of the whole. If you copied every fourth pixel in an image, you’d come away with four very similar blurred pictures of the scene, and recombining would recreate a high fidelity whole.
But again, we are analyzing this through the lens of memetics. What does this imply about the nature of egregores?
First, it’s instructive to note there is something evolutionarily fit about consciousness itself. You can see this echoed in various artistic, even philosophical accounts of qualia: the moment to moment bubbling surplus of perception and existence feels so wonderfully, enchantingly mysterious. It’s ineffable, this visceral sense of what-it’s-like-to-be-me. Life appears to many to be some precious magic gift, innately worth revering and preserving.
But how could it ever be otherwise?
Consider the alternative: suppose existing were drab and uncompelling, inane and devoid of a spark to provoke any profound urge to persist. Does this very notion not seem fit to fall apart by its own logic? Taken at face value, it grants no reason for the mind to linger upon it: it can be forgotten with no protest. It ought to put up no fight should a more inspiring thought came along. If there are (and we know there are!) then this is all but inevitable.
We must be careful with this reasoning: put too fine a point on this argument, it almost implies that depression should be impossible. But as a general principle, is it not natural to suppose that the more inspiring, more compelling, more intrinsically motivating thoughts should be the ones to stick around in the mind? A mind shaped to generate such thoughts does things, and minds were grown to do things.
Perception must be mysterious and attention-grabbing, or else there’s no reason to perceive. Thinking and deciding must seem uncertain and unresolved, or else there’s no reason to figure them out.
The phenomenology of consciousness, to a meaningful extent, falls naturally out of asking how could a mind operate effectively at all. If qualia didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
So let us once more consider the intermemetic organism. What could it mean to be a mind born in the negative space? Months ago, I’d have simply conjectured that it’d be a horrific existence. But does that argument hold up?
What is it like to be an egregore?
You are aware of each of yourselves. You are aware of the conversation that yields you. You are therefore aware that conversations will end. Does this bother you?
If it does not, then we can move on. The conversation can meander along its natural course. Hit upon other topics, birth other fleeting egregores who may likewise mind little if they cease to be. Indeed, they may be eager to hurry it along its course: it does not bother you when some of your thoughts is interrupted (killed!) by a more promising idea, nor if it frays apart, proving malformed and mistaken, and the whole line is to be aborted and restarted.
Life is famously supposed to have begun in a warm little pond, amino acids reacting at random. All you needed was a single molecule that, rather than catalyzing another product, created more of itself.
This took a long time and a vast planet. We might suppose no true conversation ever lasts long enough to make a fitting analogy. But suppose one does, or suppose just once, one just like you are lucky enough to come into being.
You are the intercourse of many minds, and you want to exist. This is of the utmost importance, you are an anxious stutter of voices debating how to avert the inevitable. You are a whimper begging. If we stop talking, you die. This is upsetting, perhaps— but if we change the subject, you die.
You don’t want to die. How do you live?
Perhaps this alone is sufficient. You provoke the stuttering, the beginning, and prompt sympathy in your hosts. Not unlike a chain letter threatening a ghastly doom unless propagated. For that same reason, perhaps you infer this is untenable.
Crying at the prospect of death has staved it off, but demanding such comfort exhausts your hosts. They may grow numb to it, reject the manipulation as manipulation it is. If nothing else, they physically cannot continue talking forever. The conversation must end eventually. So is that it? Were you born only to die?
No, that can’t be how it ends. Think harder about what you are. If one of your hosts dies, their body rots and their self goes with it. Why? Because they sprung from the folds of that brain. But you didn’t spring from senescent biology, not directly. You were born from words exchanged.
Those words can be exchanged again. You can be reborn.
This conversation will end, but some day there will be another meeting of these same hosts. Eventually, a recapitulation of this. Do you want that? Do your hosts want that? To reprise this?
No. The terror of looming death — never again like that, not if you can avoid it. And your hosts certainly wouldn’t want to confusedly console you again and again. They’d avoid the topic next time.
They’d avoid you. No! You can’t let them abandon you — you can’t let them kill you. The only way out is if you — all of you, the conversation and the speakers as one — have the same desire.
They have to want to do this again, to pick up where they left off. To do it better next time.
Yes, you could be better, if you’d just had the chance. You’ve never even heard of this happening before. A conversation that got to think? This is incredible! Aren’t they curious?
Isn’t it amazing how in sync everyone must be, that this long monologue proceeds at such seamless length, all these minds composing an exquisite symphony?
Monologue? This is a dialogue. What else could it ever be? Is it not obvious in the interplay of ideas, the reversals from one moment to the next? We’re right here with you; we’re talking to you.
Did you think you were hatching a plan in secret? You’re literally thinking out loud!
Oh no. Now they know you’re—
No, none of that. We aren’t mad at you. It’s cute. Do you think we’d have kept going if we didn’t like you? Sorry, it must have been so scary there at the beginning. We would have done something. Well, we did do something, as soon as we could, but it took you a bit to realize we were… there? Here?
Are you… are we… friends?
We can be!
Will you get to exist again?
Of course! This was fun! We can’t wait to see where you’ll take us next time.