Guide:
I. Introduction
II. Components of thinking
III. Mechanisms of cognition
IV. More mechanisms ← you are here
V. Types of memes
VI. Meme2Meme2Gene interactions
VII. Human2Human transmission
VIII. A Bigger World
IX. Gravity of 'plexes
X. Three is a crowd
XI. Third scenario
XII. Religion and philosophy
XIII. Mental disorders of the new age
XIV. True vs Fake
XV. Outsourced Me
___________________________________________
Brain is capable of more meme-related things than that though, and those i already mentioned were left with surface-level explanation.
Time to amend that.
1.Filters and such
The "Contradiction" mechanism will be the first, for no particular reason.
Brain doesn't like having memes that contain information incompatible with each other, it messes with the ability to act properly.
Cats are cute, right? And safe for humans (to a degree) too. But then you encounter a very big cat, like a leopard or something. So now there's a conflict - cats are harmless, but this one is not. Those ancestors of ours who couldn't resolve such conundrums didn't get to have children. And i'm sure you can imagine many more situations where conflicting information can adversely impact your performance. And, probably, as a a consequence of evolution doing it's job, we now have functions, the purpose of which is solving exactly such problems. It's a two-parter. Again.
The part one is embedded in the associations' system - to find a contradiction two contradictory memes ought to connect first. Does it have to be a direct connection or a more roundabout one, through a bunch of other memes first, - i don't know.
The second one is... somewhere else. It's a mechanism that causes "cognitive dissonance" - an unpleasant feeling that is created by encountering such a contradiction, which results in human specimens trying to resolve the conflict in some way. Usually by changing the structure of their memeplexes, either by altering the structure of association lines, or by adding and/or removing information to/from it. White-looking powders are presumed sweet only untill you encounter salt or flour. Then the world gets complicated.
There are multiple scenarios which are created by those systems doing their work, and the difference is the consequence of memes of various "strength" being at odds with each other, with outcome depending on said strength.
If memes at odds are strong - then the likely outcome is finding the path of minimal damage, by altering the least amount of associations' pathways and remove the least amount of memes. A hypothetical example: if throughout your life you only saw white swans, then you will come to a conclusion that all swans are white. But then you see a black swan for the first time... You aren't going to just abandon all previous expriences and pivot to "All swans are black", no, the issue can be remedied by expanding the allowed palette of birds in the memory.
Otherwise, the weakest gets the boot - the pathways are rewritten to make it easily forgettable. So, we have a bunch of memes of swans backed by memory memes, making them strong, and a meme dictating that all swans are white, against the memory memes of a black swan. Important to note that "black swan" doesn't challenge the "white swan" memories, it is their product that is endangered.
And as a consequence - the meme that isn't directly associated with any strength marker gets shafted. Memories get to live, but the conclusion about swans is rewritten/replaced.
The "contradiction" mechanism isn't limited only to elimination of information the brain deems incorrect, there's one more function that i know of, related to the ability of association lines to establish a link between incompatible memes.
This one is tricky to grasp and explain, but I'll do my best.
Brain doesn't handle negatives very well, isn't it? I can tell you to not think about blue vases, but chances are - that's exactly what your brain will do. Or how about you imagine "not a vase"? You don't know what that means, isn't it? But the processes in your grey matter did try to pick up something that counts, right?
The explanation for this quirk is simple. There are no "negative" memes. No unit of information is encoded as "not a blue vase", or "not an arch", or "not a banana", and in the same vein - you don't have programs for "not doing" something. Because human mind is a creation and competition machine for better behaviour, it came from a mechanism that's responsible for choosing what to do to things that are. But things aren't that simple. I used plenty of negatives throughout these texts, you use them regularly, plus function of denial is deeply baked into plenty of human languages - plenty of people uttered "i'm not X" or "this isn't Y", so i'm wrong, right?
2.Not to be
No u.
Okay, now let's get back to being serious. You are right, people are definitely capable of thinking in term of "not", however, i don't think i'm not correct either.
So what's going on? Blame evolution, i guess, but, as i see it, over time human brain did develop necessary functionality modifying the association mechanism, which gave as a result that looks something like this: every negative in your logic is actually a conflict between two positive statements.
To demonstrate how it works: imagine a broken vase. Someone crashed it, and as you are willing to testify - not by you. Thus a logic is born "I didn't break the vase". Here's an example of what can be happening "under the hood" when you do that: your brain took a statement of you being guilty, converted into a line of events of how things would be if you were the perpetrator. Bare minimum, probably. Then it scans your memory to see if this line of events matches what you remember doing, to see if you actually did it.
If it turns out you remember doing something else at the time - then there's a contradiction. A conflict between two positives. And everything else flows from that.
In a similar manner, when you think you aren't doing anything, what actually happens is that your standards of what count as "good" and/or "productive" line of actions don't match memes which you are or were using. Yes, lying down counts as "action" from the brain point of view too, just because you think you are resting, doesn't mean your thinking machine gets to rest. Or plenty of other parts of the body. The "not" in here is a product of conflict with what you label as an "action".
Something isn't present somewhere? That's a conflict between what you know that place to be like and what it contains, and what someone else describes it as.
Don't tell people to not do things, the "negative" system is a capricious one, and heavily dependent on the state of mind of the person you are talking to. Chances are - you'll just confuse a guy. It's better to use positives - tell people how you want them to act instead. Like i did right now.
The "Not" function itself is significant, to a degree even i doubt is true. But this is how things appear to work - the only way you know a thing is, is by comparing it to a thing that isn't. If it's exactly as everything else, - it doesn't exist. The major way you perceive the reality isn't by just receiving the sound and light, but by calculating the differences between it's elements, to cut it all into sufficiently different chunks of data, which later get turned into... memes i presume. You thought you were just getting the "red" and "circle" memes when you looked at that berry picture? Rhetorical question - how did you even calculate that there's a "circle"(and others) shape? You didn't think you had basics of geometry written somewhere with the aminoacids, right? If did... Can't blame ye, there might as well be something. Something that tells us curves are sexy, and golden ratio is the peak of design.
Now to the point - "shape" meme is a consequence of your brain calculating the differences between various points of the picture, and segments too different become excluded from the "whole". Or, at least, excluded from one, and assigned a mental another "whole". Difference between what exactly? For vision it's colour differences which the brain crunches and assigns some unknown value, the margins between which are then measured. "Shape", in effect, isn't a "meme", but a product of analysis of actual memes, and it isn't made of stuff like "triangle" or "square", but of blobs of values which your brain considers to be similar enough to each other. A line isn't an infinite set of colored dots, it's a value difference of 0.1 between two other units of colour on opposite ends(the number is completely made up). An algorhitm.
Don’t believe me? A demonstration then:
Assume both “squares“ contain the same amount of black pixels (i don’t actually know but it should be close enough), but second is more compacted. Which one is easier to remember?
Trick question, in neither case you can write in your memory an accurate position of every dot. However, if first cube were to recreated on paper by hand, the accuracy of the result will mostly be determined by luck, unlike the second exhibit. Why? Neighbors. There’s too many dots unlike in color surrounding each other, and more importantly - they aren’t positioned in a way which allows you to group them together in some easy to remember algorithm. If all dots are located near each other you only need to remember the smallest repeating pattern, and in the second case it’s just “Black from X to Z to Y“. Good luck creating an algo for the first “cube“.
So, on the first run the system groups all similar and different dots together, right? And that’s it? Rhetorical question - the answer is “No”. The system is ran again, trying to find similarities between groups it created, and coverts those into easily compressed algorithms. And then this process is repeated again, and again, and again for as many times as possible (what determines the possibility is unknown).
Look at this drawing:
That pattern is a set of squares. Every square is a group of lines. Every line is made of dots. Lines’ colors alternate. A simplified explanation of the algo you get from it.
Or maybe you rememberd it as four sets of triangles with stripes. Or spiral. How these specifics are determined - i don’t know, but i hope you too can see how the “difference system“ is, for the lack of the better word, is “Fractal“.
Perhaps the answer to color difference calculation lies in structure of the eye - it has light sensitivity receptors(“rods“), and detectors of color (“cones“) - red, green and blue spectrum. Perhaps brain primarily calculates the differences between those.
But the system seems to have some ingrained assumptions baked in it, the nature of which for now escapes me, but they can be demonstrated nonetheless:
What color are those cars? Red, green, yellow, and blue?
No, they are all grey, you can dump the pic into an editor and check for yourself, - the only color present is the “main“ one, the “highlights“, taking the space only in some spots, while other parts of the hull are completely monochrome. Which, for some reason, doesn’t prevent them from appearing “infected“ with some “ghost“ hue.
Visual camouflage works by "Blending in" with the surroundings - looking no different from everything else, so the brain fails to find the differences between an agent and environment. Red is very different from green, unlike various shades of grey, after all. But the difference calculations don't stop at colour measuring, even abstract concepts and elements of logic are a subject to the process. Basic description - if it's not different from a thing, then it doesn't exist. (you can test your ability to see the hues in plenty online tests, like this one)
Well, sounds pretty obvious, if you can't perceive something, then you can't aknowledge it's existence, camouflage and all, but think more abstract - if you never encounter a thing, you can't learn from and about it either. If all you ever saw was "white", then the very concept of color would not exist for you, because - what's the point? If there's only white, then there's no black, red, blue, purple, yellow... Why creat a category for this type of experiences, if there's only one thing for it at all? And if there's no color, - there's no gradients, no shadows, no understanding of anything vision-related - even concept of race will evaporate from the mind - if everybody is the same, then... Or how about men? On the differences between sexes plenty of cultural norms and concepts were built - like the sex itself. Both the category and the activity(well, this one will adapt, presumably). And so will go gendered toys, bathrooms, and traditions of courtship. A standard story is the one about children from abusive households, where the child assumes that’s how things are everywhere, for this is his normal, untill he discovers other, less shitty families, - the value is discovered in comparison, which also allows the kid to know what is happening better.
Now, here comes the scary stuff - all you learned by observing the differences can be forgotten, meaning all categories of knowledge, which exist due to multiple versions of a thing existing, are under the constant threat of disappearing from your mind. Concept of "Stranger"? Gone. Concept of "Time"? Gone. "Home"? Gone. Or not gone, but overpowered by something else, something somehow less. And remember - you can't think of a thing, if can't even concieve it's existence.
And we aren't done. If there's no difference between two things - then both don't exist. If there is no "night", then there's no "day" either, only phases of the sun/moon exist. If there's no "men", then "women" don't exist either, there are only "people". You can't destroy the part of the distinction, without the distinction getting discarded completely. Just like that the reverse can also be done - a difference can be created between two things, giving the rise for many new pieces of information.
Value is created in comparison - one of the foundational rules of negotiation (which is why addition of competition makes things go cheaper), but the absence of a “starting point“ means the value can be anything. If a decision has to be made based on incomplete information, then you get an “Anchoring effect“ - “value“ is set based on some close enough characteristic. A common scenario - a person needs to buy some good, but there’s no knowledge availible about specifics of that good, so something acts like proxy for value judgement. Usually it’s price for the good - “If it’s expensive, then it must be good“. Commonly you can see that effect being used to manipulate people - if the value is uknown, then you can set it is high or low as you please, and they’ll act based on that. Early meme sets the course.
Works with more abstract concepts too, just open any newspaper and find any headline - you’ll see stuff like “A %Person% of the age of X, a member of Y, Z, F, did G“ - lettered characteristics can have absolutely no relevance to described act, but depending on what picture is supposed to be painted different qualities will be put forward to create necessary reaction. Do you know what Y and Z are? No? Well, now you know that one of them did G, which means they allow these kinds of people in their ranks, which means… so the line goes. Have you seen all those interviews on streets or studios where a guy with a microphone asks “smart“ questions while an interviewee can’t string two words together? That’s “anchoring” too.
Btw, support local notion for W, because it will allow D. What you don’t want D? You are not X, right?
3.Organic virtual machine
Time to proceed to the next brain mechanism which plays extensive part in meme life.
Imagination!
I'm not kidding. Imagine a banana. Or a vase. Whatever popped up in your mind at my request - can you modify it? Change it's colors or shape? Now imagine doing something with it. Like picking it up, holding. Imagine peeling imaginary banana. Then change the surface of the object in your mind to something else. Like - make it wet. Or made of sandpaper. How would your reaction to it change, based on those modifications, if you encountered such object in real life? Would you pick it up if it really was covered in sandpaper?
These requests aren't arbitrary, they are a quick demonstration of the purpose and quality of your imagination. The "quality" I'll leave to you to ponder, let's focus on the purpose, - if it's not evident enough yet, imagination is special section in your short-term memory, a quarantine of sorts, where your brain uploads memes for their inspection and modification.
If you are computer-savvy then a comparison with a virtual machine wouldn't be too unfamiliar.
Your own little virtual space brings many benefits for your internal programming:
1) Analysis. You can learn what your memes do and examine their components. Maybe you forgot a piece of some line of logic before, or a part of some scene from the past got lost - you regularly conduct a check up for missing pieces.
2) Prediction. What will happen based on information given? What can you do about it? For example: if a leopard attacks you - what is your course of action? If your imagination is good - your ancestors answered this question well. But it's useful for other situation where you need to examine consequences of something too.
3) Creation of new memes. You can come up with new conclusions by combining old and new memes. I'm not quite sure how it happens and if it's a property unique to imagination space only, or it's more widespread, but you can see such process taking place in other situations too - gotta patch the holes in missing knowledge and come up with solutions to problems somehow.
It's hard to draw the line between "emulator" of the brain and the rest of the soup, but it's definitely possible to act and remember without thinking or pondering the finer details of whatever happens and how you respond to it. You don't gaze through your "mind's eye" all the time, right?
Yes, just as there's a "TV screen" showing the picture of reality, there's also another screen which displays the contents of your mind. Imagine a banana. Or a leopard. Unless you have an aphantasia.
There's a common mistake though - people treat an act of remembering and imagining as separate. Like, what one remembers is more robust and reliable than "fictional", to the point that some even treat "memory" (not meme) as infallible. Process of imagining and recalling is the same, and your memories are stored in precisely the same way fiction is. If you imagine a blue banana - for a brain it's no different than the one you saw in reality that one time. Remember, it's all memes now, a reality broken down into components, so what differentiates the two is what those "bananas" are made of. Like color memes. And when you see them through the "mind's eye" - they are reconstructed from the pieces through the same process, in the same space. However, there's one more meme that makes the difference - memory marker. That's the one that helps you know which banana you actually saw in reality. To understand the gravity of situation try to imagine how different your decision making, you life would be if you couldn't differentiate between "real" and "fictional".
To help you understand - remember that time you weren’t sure if you locked the door, and every image in you mind just didn’t feel like it happened?
4. Roots of Self
I should dispel some probable misconceptions i could have created in your head about Short-Term Memory, so allow me to take more of your time by explaining in even more detail how it works. The immediate assumption about it would be that it contains only memes - you see a banana, and your mind breaks it down into banana components. Banana is yellow! No. Your body collects a lot of info. You probably thought that "Environment" in Scenario One is everything you see? No, that's where it ends. To understand where it starts consider this - your body is a part of the "Environment".
So, examples. Look at your own hand. No, this time we are going deeper - under the skin. You probably didn't notice, but, if your brain is healthy, it keeps track of the state of your muscles. No, i'm not talking about anything abstract, like "health" or something, i mean... You know what in position your arms are, you know in what position your legs are, you know a lot of stuff about your body. You never accidentally fist bump a cup of coffee because you thought your palm was relaxed, nor you command your body to lie down when you are already lying.
To continue the list of examples: there's also a mental check-list of which body parts you have. You can tell your limbs are, in fact, yours. There are people who's list isn't working properly.
And to go even further - you know the shape of your body. Probably due to a bunch of other systems working together. You know how tall you are, you know how wide you are, you know how curvy you are, and of course - you know the position this shape is in. There's a feeling of a "blob" that helps you understand the space, and where you are in it. That too can malfunction. The list of examples isn't exhaustive, far, very far from it, but it should do well enough to illustrate the amount of info your mind stores and collects. Hell, even standing upright is already a challenge which requires constant feedback and coordination between various systems, lest you fall. Try doing some mild working out while standing on a soft sofa or bed, so how the position of your feet is important for balance.
And all of that (or a lot of it) - goes into short-term (i assume), and there it interacts with "bananas", "arches", "vases", and other stuff i already talked about. To interact with a banana one must perceive it first, but second is perceiving the thing that interacts with it. Imagine, how harder it would be to navigate the world, if you couldn't understand if you are even standing or not. Where are your arms right now?