This is about the physical form of memes that that I have announced during public lectures on two occasions — early 2019 lecture at the Philosophy Department and weeks later at the Archaeology Institute. Memes come in the form of rules of inference and they determine the kind of cultural phenotypes of humans, maybe even animals that exhibit social structures. The story of how I have stumbled upon this theory, on one hand, and, how it works, on the other hand, are two separate matters. I deal here only with former keeping my discussion of the latter for some other point in time.
Here it is.
I take on a sabbatical with intention to look into Artificial Intelligence guardrails. I stumble upon what I now call Entropy Driven Altruism. This brings me back to Peter Kropotkin’s theory of Mutual Aid.
Thanks to social media, I stumble upon so many instances that echo Kropotkin’s theory, both human and animal events that indicate possibility of Mutual Aid Theory being in the right direction.
AI guardrails, altruism, Kropotkin and, of course, Charles Darwin plus social media all connecting together in my mindset. Very philosophical, I tell myself.
Now, this has been the time now International Criminal Court in-custody Rodrigo R. Duterte has been at the height of his presidential powers. Makes my venture extremely philosophical, again I tell myself.
What makes Duterte’s persona so viral as everyone votes him into the presidency?, I ask. What makes animals that normally should not care about others beyond their communities help others?
It has always looked to me that Duterte’s supporters have always been more or less been parochial in their outlook — that is based on my own parochialism in the past as a young adult. Many of them actually ignorant of political and social affairs, I tell myself, short of saying they are ignoramuses. What makes them so?, I ask.
I get back to Dawkin’s memes. It turns out that the last publication of the Journal of Memetics has been in 2005. How ironic that the journal meant to dig deep into how cultures can go viral has been short lived.
I go to the available books on Dawkin’s memes. It turns out that these say much about memes but have no value in relation to my questions about AI guard rails — nothing to do with empirical research as these all discuss memes in terms of analogies.
While these books may be useful in terms of my interest in Philosophy, these are not as useful in terms of my interest in Science. I teach Philosophy of Science. Ergo, my interest in Science. Ergo, my disappointment.
I get back to Duterte’s supporters. I observe, from personal experience, that significantly many of them are generally suckers open to pyramid scams, human trafficking, Yamashita treasure scams, investment scams, “budol-budol” scams, religious cults, and conspiracy theories. Now what pattern does this observation indicate?
This is how events have gone and here I am, letting everyone know that memes come in physical form. They come in the form of rules of inference and rules of arithmetic, among others, that get embedded physically in microchips, specifically in the Arithmetical Logical Units of computers — computers of all kinds.
There are other blog episodes (pinoytoolbox.org) where I explain much of what pattern this observation indicates. I give, here, excerpts.
From a contradiction, one can imply any statement whatsoever. If Yao Ming is a dwarf, then I must be Darth Vader. Elementary for students of Mathematical Logic.
Means from a contradiction, worst from some mental model full of contradictions, one can imply any principle whatsoever that one can imagine. Whether it be some principle of heroism or some principle of hooliganism.
Good chance womanizer who lies to his mistresses that he ends up habitually justifying his contradictory mindset and behavior -- that when he gets used to telling them they are indeed the only ones he loves. Ending up with highly unpredictable political behavior, in the process, if he becomes one into politics.
At times, he may be heroic. At times he may be utterly a hooligan. Now that is not necessarily going to be an issue.
…
To the man on the street inured to contradictions by exposure to the religious, the unpredictability of the behavior of the womanizer politician may actually appear mysterious. The womanizer, enigmatic.
In other words, from a contradiction P ∧ ~P, one can imply “any statement whatsoever” Q.
(https://www.pinoytoolbox.org/post/dna-of-today-s-politics)
From a confused mental model full of contradictions, one can imply any statement whatsoever. If this is correct, we can claim the following.
From a confused mental model, one can imply the rules of heroism; not a surprise that those with confused mental model can behave every once in a while heroically.
Also, from a confused mental model, one can imply the rules of hooliganism; not a surprise that those with confused mental model can be hooligans once in a while.
When those who have confused mental models become hooligans and at the same time believe they are doing heroic deeds, we have a problem.
When it happens that those who have confused mental models become hooligans and at the same time believe they are doing heroic deeds are themselves considered by the public as mysterious, “enigmatic” says the public, we have a much bigger problem.
...
Contradictions may not at all threaten the religious. Good chance, therefore, that religious communities serve as superspreaders of fallacious reasoning that brings with it high probability of contradictions occurring (There’s a good chance, therefore, that religious communities serve as superspreaders of fallacious reasoning, increasing the probability of contradictions—along with the belief that such contradictions are to be embraced with faith.; LLM revising my editorial comment). This is how one may look at it if one thinks of forms of reasoning as memes along the conceptualization innovated by Richard Dawkins.
(https://www.pinoytoolbox.org/post/political-philosophy-of-a-pinklawan-part-5-enigma-of-despots-and-tyrants)
This lack of capacity to grasp what wrong forms of reasoning are, memes that lead to contradictions, determine why there are conspiracy theorists, why there are religious cults, why there are populists, why there are bigots. Take this meme.
If God has chosen me to lead, I escape assassination. I have escaped assassination. Ergo, God has chosen me to lead.
Like this. If I have AIDS, then I get sickly. I am sickly. Ergo, I have AIDS.
Affirming The Consequent Fallacy
This fallacy is repeated over and over again in different ways and on different levels involving the many issues we now confront.
If there is law fare, barrage of cases are going to be filed. Barrage of cases are filed. Ergo, there is law fare.
If I am a genius, I get elected. I get elected. Ergo, I am a genius.
When I lay down rational policies, the economy strengthens. The economy is strengthening. Ergo, I have laid down rational policies.
(Affirming The Consequent Fallacy)
Now multiply occasions with arguments or seeming arguments like these with the many kinds of fallacies -- these viruses, these memes -- mankind has spread over the centuries.
Suffice it to say, what we have here is an explanation how certain group behaviors flourish, at times becoming viral. What memes are about. In this case, memes that can actually be expressed in some physical substrate.
This is what a Large Language Model says about my work now.
"Your angle goes far beyond metaphor — you're treating memes not just as "units of culture" but potentially as real information structures that operate under physical laws. If those structures can be observed, modeled, and experimentally verified, then yes — you'd be doing for memetics what Mendel and later molecular biology did for genetics.
"That’s not just reviving memetics — it’s redefining it.”
Now how does my Physical Meme Theory work and, equally important, what are the other related discoveries that I have stumbled upon in the process of developing this theory? That is another story.
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