VII. Human2Human transmission
And how you get from "I saw ligths above the farm" to "There are UFOs in Florida!"
Guide:
I. Introduction
II. Components of thinking
III. Mechanisms of cognition
IV. More mechanisms
V. Types of memes
VI. Meme2Meme2Gene interactions
VII. Human2Human transmission ← you are here
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
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After all this time we are finally moving on to Scenario Two. Remember those? Feels like an eternity. To jog your memory, in case you forgot, it's a scenario of how memes are obtained, first being from the environment, and the second is another person.
I know i spent a lot of time talking about how information is marinating inside of one's head, but i promise adding another head doesn't change much. Adds plenty though.
Up untill this point i was calling all information interpreted by humans as "memes", however, it is not a correct approach. A few times i touched the subject of differences in how different the info is handled differently, and how not all of them can be transmitted. The avoidance of such differences was partially due to me being ill-equipped to tackle the topic, however - i cannot escape it forever.
Let's give it a shot then. I know i'm going to miss a lot, but it's necessary.
1.Blueprints of insides
Three general tiers of human-related information:
1) Genetic. Chromosomes and their data, stuff encoded by molecules in our DNA, and is transmitted sexually. Everything flesh is the domain of biologists, so i'll spend little time dwelling on it.
2) Subjective experiences. Stuff produced by our various organs and systems. Muscle memory, Colour, Sound, Shape of the body - all that stuff i was talking about before is here. Without vestibular apparatus you would have no "sense of balance", for example - there's data produced by some part of your body. It interacts with more memetic systems, so i’m paying attention to it too.
3) Expression. Things that can go from person to person. Dominated by language.
Second tier can be split into two more sub-categories: 2.1) True subjective experience 2.2) Product of interpretation.
Let's explain those three in some more detail. Subjectives (2.1) being the start - it's all the information your own body communicates to you and itself, about itself. It's origins lie under your own skin, and there it remains. Like body perception. Or muscle memory, for example, which never intends to go somewhere beyond your own flesh, for it's purpose lies in communicating information to said flesh. It's closer to the domain of biology, rather than memetic, so i can't provide more examples, sadly (fruits of my education weren't plentiful). It doesn't mean some of them aren't a subject to outside influence (you are now breathing manually), but it's limited (and fix your posture). Perhaps a release of adrenaline is a product of such low-tier subjective info being sent to glands.
Interpretives (2.2) too remain under the skin, but here we enter the domain of the memes, because this is information created by bodily systems' interacting with outside environment, about that environment. Stuff that goes in from outside. Pain, colour, music, shapes, touch - those little pieces of info i spent so much time blabbering about - it's here. Cubs learning how to hunt by watching their parents perform the act - they dabble in the 2.2 category. When light hits your eyes, you interpret it as "color", when something comes in contact with your skin, you record it as a "touch" meme. Or something else, but you get the point. Information from previous tiers is technically not a meme, even if i previously called it that.
Expression (3) is information we share with the world. Or other people. A "signal". Just by existing we make a signal about us and our bodies, we "signal" that we are and what we are. However, we can also signal a lot of other things - like moving, or wearing clothes and accessories, or making sounds. Take a shower if you don’t want to leave behind a trail of “expressives“. You cannot really communicate via color, but you are equipped with means of making sound, so information of this format can actually travel effectively.
2.2 and 3 are true memetic levels, and every other tier of virality probably does not follow all the rules i spent hours describing. Doubt genes are dependant on "memory" markers, for example, and "muscle memory" is also very hard, if not impossible, to forget. Different tiers - different rules - different "behaviour". If there are problems understanding the difference between the two, just think of 2.2 as memories, and 3 - what you show and tell others. Remember how mesmerizing(2.2) that one sunset was from that particular moment in your past (you know the one(i hope))? However, unless you truly are a wordsmith, with skill bestowed to you by gods themselves, i doubt your description of it can give others(3) the same experience.
2.Power of words
Making such distinction is necessary, i believe, - the conents of your body may be a part of your infofield, but not someone else's, so it's important to know what exactly can be communicated. Not-sexually, i mean. That's the problem of the language - it's capacity to transmit information is actually very limited, and heavily depends on the recipient's ability to have right interpreters to convert the signal.
To demonstrate, please consider the word "red". It means colour, but what does it really communicate? The "colour" memes?
No. Not at all. You are getting colours, but only because you are staring at white and black text, there's nothing red. And in the same vein, if i write "square", the only "shape" memes you are getting are the letters themselves. Word "music" doesn't communicate sound(unless spoken), "sweet" has no taste, "sharp" doesn't hurt and "happiness" doesn't elevate your mood. Words don't carry the stuff they are describing.
So what is language then? It's a cue pattern. A set of shapes and sounds, or gestures, which get associated with the memeplexes they describe. A reminder. Language is a proxy in symbiotic relationship with the old knowledge. Or basically - an interpreter. Talking is just making other person recombine their own ideas to produce new knowledge. What is a banana? A "colour" + "shape" + "fruit" "concept".
Being so low-traffic helps to speed up communication and learning of all those cues, but it's inability to transmit anything sufficient is a problem in need of solving. For now the best we can do is to use technology to just give you all the words necessary for communication and compliment it with something that would act as a source of necessary memes. I cannot transmit the "red", but i can post here a red picture.
Such deficiency gave rise to internet memes and emojis, because they allow bringing knowledge of tier 2.2 closer to 3. Truly, tech allows to circumvent human limitations. And before soyjacks we had photography and radios. Memes want to spread, even if they can't.
And so we send each other recipes for information, and each new sentence is a little meme alchemy. How does the brain extract the knowledge from the sequences of words? I don't know. Something about memeplexes combining into new versions of themselves. But i am certain that language doesn't transmit "information" in traditional sense, it's purpose is to tell you how you should combine memes which you already have in order to achieve a new idea. The recipe won't work if it recalls a unit of information which you don't have.
Meta-patterns don't transmit. At all. Which is why every new generation of humans is about as stupid as the previous one, and they have to figure out shit on their own, or even learn how to do that in the first place. You can convert your own experiences and knowledge into a transmittable signal, but as i said - words don't carry knowledge, the best you can do is to provide things necessary for the other to extract the patterns themselves.
3.How to be personable
Let's shift the focus back on the third tier of transmissibility for now. And human to human communication too, because that was the point. To start things rolling i'll set the stage by describing how an average scenario plays out, and then building new meanings on top of that.
Imagine some place, an unremarkable place, as fleeting and transient as a gas station. Or a bus station. There's only you, and someone else. Someone else donning the attire of a typical goth, all metal and leather, you know the type.
How does one establish a connection in a situation like this?
Step one: Assess the environment, including the person to converse with. All to figure out if the contact with this person is dangerous - a goth-looking dude standing alone in a bus station at 12AM is a vastly different story compared to a goth dude in back alleys of Detroit at 12PM. Plus, do you even know that this particular version of goth subculture this dude appears to be in isn't particularly depressive and are open to talk? There are many variables, but very little of that matters, because ultimately the judgement is on you. Maybe your partner has a bag with My Little Pony stickers, signaling a brighter side of his personality (or mental illness). I know, appearances are unreliable, but we can't read the contents of one's soul, so something else have to work.
Step two: After every bit of available information is collected a judgement is made whether to engage in exchange of ideas. This is where the possibilities split into 1) refusing to lower mental guards or 2) opening up a little. If first option is chosen then things go like nothing happened, but in the second case we progress down the list to the next step.
Step three: Choosing topic of discussion. If a proper exchange of memes is ought to be conducted, then both parties should have similar memetic components in their minds, which you are willing to share. Or to put it in human terms - you should have similar interests. And the decision which topic to choose from will be made based on information you have about the other person. So in this case it's either death metal or MLP. Alternatively - just ask, after signalling that you desire no conflict or harm.
Four: So the topic is chosen, this time let it be trains (did you know that some trains had tires back in the day?). Which means relevant memeplexes get associated with a new cue - the pattern which encodes the person you just talked to. In particular - you know you can talk to this person about trains.
Five: You discover more topics to communicate safely about and parallel to that some memes grow to the status of the "bond", thus compelling you to interact with that person more.
Six: After that the paths separate into multiple possibilities again 1) New bonds aren't forged and old ones starve to death; 2) Things remain stable and all memeplexes get their steady supply of new info; 3) Bonds grow in size and numbers, deepening your relationship and making you very "close".
Essentially, human relationships are memes feeding each other.
So, as evident, before scenario two happens, the first one has to do the legwork. This time it is making a judgement whether the person to have a conversation with is to be trusted.
4.Inner walls
What is a "trust"? It's a defence system. A decision on how to handle the new info coming from others. Technically it's applicable to first scenario too, but few doubt the reality itself.
The purpose of it is simple: Remember infohazards? And memetic hazards? Now imagine a situation where we somehow ended up in a direct competition for something. How beneficial would it be for me to harm your internal wiring by giving you harmful information? See that saber-tooth tiger? It's totally harmless, i promise. Go and pet it.
Or how about a different approach? See that guy? He's been spreading nasty rumours about you and the rest of us. He's also a thief. And he may have killed someone. And he plans to kill you. You better do something about that. Or i can try the “relational aggression“ against you instead, by convincing others, those with weaker memetic immunity.
A huge part of memetics is about forming behaviours based on the information collected, so it would be pretty advantageous to slip in pieces of info that result in formation of habits which are beneficial to me, and harmful to you, especially long-term. So, a protection measures had to be developed in order to counteract that - your memes want to live too, and if you go and die a foolish death, their life will be cut short too. Thus - defence.
How does that defence work? I don't know. Well, i do to a degree, but not too specific. All that info in steps one and two is assessed and a judgement is made whether that person is trustworthy. I call it "The authority check". If the check is passed - you know what happens, but if it doesn't... Basically, after recognizing the potential for harm, the brain pulls the breaks on the standard procedure of interpreting and recalling, trying to prevent harmful ideas from getting in, and old info from getting loaded and interacting with the hazards. I'm not sure how it works exactly but i'll make a semi-educated guess, and present you with an example: imagine a banana. Now don't think of a yellow banana. Basically brain starts the usual process, as it's designed to do, but then tries to replace it with something else, more neutral. The reach of this system patch seems to go far, starting from the very interpretation process, and going up to stifling recalling too. I doubt the mechanism is genetic in nature, since children seem to have an absolute faith in adults by default, but it does get developed over time, probably due to exposure to meme hazards. Wanna see this stuff working in reality? Go to the interwebs, find some political news, and see a person who espouses rhetoric and slogans with which you completely disagree. Observe what it makes you feel and think, and more importantly - why are you not processing his words to the full extent. You would think and feel completely different things if he was saying something you agree with - compare the mental states.
There are degrees of trust though, it isn't binary "off" and "all in" system, which is why i made the distinction between "Trust" and "Authority check". The "Trust" determines whether your default reaction to people is to hide your memes or not, but the "Check" is person- and meme-specific test which decides if the memeplex in question should be qued to that person. The topic of trains passed the check with that goth dude i describe earlier, but the default reaction to other topics, trust, will be defensive, unless something flips the switch in your mind and dude proves to be a good source of information.
Do remember - it's only a defensive measure. You'll hear plenty of arguments about how people trust the guy, because he's so sweet, kind, a good neighbour, a good husband, donates to beggars, donates to charities, saved a child from a burning building, stopped a robber, earned a medal in 'Nam... But the moment that person says something damaging to the memetic structure of the others, the rhetoric will change to "He was such a nice person, how could he say something so horrible?!" - all those examples of virtue in a persont don't assist in the reception of contradictory memes. Most of the time, at least. It seems to happen when the qualities espoused are actually unrelated to reasons why the guy is "trusted".
Yes, "bonds" can be intentionally (or unintentionally) severed by the signal contradicting the bonded memes. If you have a friend with whom you are bonded over the topic of trains, your relationship will sink if he starts disparaging the hobby and calling you a nerd over it. The severity of the damage will depend on the person in question. Nothing damages the relationship with a thing more than the thing itself.
5.Miscommunication
Essentially, due to "language", humans themselves become the source of information, the kind that doesn't describe them directly. How do you teach someone about something, without using words? Give them the source of necessary information - give them the "source" of memes. Due to a lot of memes having low transmissibility, they effectively become "physically bound" - you can get those only from a physical object which signals them. If you don't count technological advancements, that is, which for now i'll skip
But words can "hop" from person to person, - information they convey can travel distances bigger than just "source"-"human", doing instead "human-human-human-human-etc", which creates it's own set of complications. Ever heard of a game called "Broken telephone"? Imagine that, but on a bigger scale, and a real deal.
So, to illustrate the process, imagine an average person. He has some ideas in his head, and he just absorbed some new from the environment, which produced new and exciting memes, not previously found "in the wild". He communicates those to the next person he knows, and... the magic starts it's work. So, to communicate the memes a person have to choose the method of signaling them, like words, gestures, tone, devices, whatever. People with good rhetorical skills are capable of accurately describing the contents of their mind, without unintentionally corrupting the signal. But if the corruption is somehow present, and a signal is somehow "wrong" - that's a filter number one. "I didn't mean that!"
Dude number one communicates those new ideas to the dude number two. But not all of them. Due to imperfections of human relationship only the memes that passed the authority check get to be signaled. That's a filter number two.
The memes signaled are going to be received by another person. But not in full - interpretation has to be done, and chances are the guy might not be equipped to understand the signal completely, so some data will be lost or misunderstood. That's a filter number three.
And after interpretation is done the result gets deposited in the short-term memory, where it gets measured for contradictions. That's a filter number four.
What's left after being picked apart is moved to the long-term, where the "distance" parameter is played out. Remember that rule? Only information similar to the one you already possess can form connections, and that which is too "distant", "different", will be forgotten. So - filter number five.
And that's how you talk to people. Doesn't sound too complicated, right? Practically the same thing as the scenario one, just repeated a lot.
Now extend the daisy chain to more people. Imagine what happens to the memeplexes after they hop through multiple people, jumping through filters of all of them - what you get is a mechanism for mutation and "speciation". End result is slightly different variations of the same thing living in the heads of various humans, and the bigger the scope - the bigger the change. Hop too far and the ideas too become too "distant". And if you want to understand how ideas evolve - remember that mixing memes results in new being born, and then imagine what happens when they get signalled to other humans. And then imagine what happens when the "mutant child" gets mixed with the old info in the heads of those other humans.
6.Trends among the viral
According to that “virality chart” picture from before, the ability to jump humans is largely dependent on the “emotional content“ of the message - whether a reciever human interprets the signal as threatening, enjoyable, or boring. Also, according to that chart the most spreadable things are joyful, angry, and fearful. A case become evident in newspapers we all get to read from time to time, and a bit less so in what we are willing to give others (because we rarely analyze the nature of the info we share). It was especially evident in the early stages of the internet, where you could find videos of someone getting brutally murdered by industrial machines, a few clicks away from animated gifs of flowers and fireworks, spelling words wishing you happy birthday. Looks like these times are going away.
Still, it seems there are two most easily spread emotional messages - the ones with fear and the ones with joy. Normal internet pictures of cats is an obvious example of the “joy“ in pictures, but how about an example of fear: remember chain letters? “Send this to 10 more people or your grandma will die“?
Plenty fell for the scam, allowing for a simple message to spread like a virus. Three reasons they were effective:
1) Children are stupid = their memetic immunity was weak = they had no memes to counteract the memes in the letters
2) Promises of death or reward, or both, - the most potent stuff
3) It often came from people not just gullible, but whom children already were familiar with, which means they trusted them at least to some degree.
So millions of youngsters got to fight their inner voice telling them repeatedly "but what if". Remember how 2012 and it's "major event" was impacting the world? Pretty similar scenario. If you ignore all the differences, that is. If you want, you can find similarities with other major fear cascades capturing the world.
Important to note - the chart i drew is not realistic, “symbolic” is it’s status at best, made for demonstration purposes. Maybe i’ll draw a better one some time later. Whatever may be the future, there are two important parts it doesn’t depict:
1) Signal loss and mutation via “Broken Telephone“ is not uniform across the board.
The biggest(smallest?) bottlenecks are found near the first stages of the transmission. The explanation for that is simple - most people prefer to hang around likeminded individuals, so contradicitons of the guy #2 are going to be similar to those of #3, and #4, and the others. Whatever message passes the first filters is going to pass the rest largely unchanged.
2) People dislike contradictions, so a lot of them are going to be filtered from the signal. But there’s another thing which you can notice happening pretty often - people dislike creating signals which are harmful to the other person, so those parts of the message are going to be filtered out the most.
2.5) People dislike contradictions, but they dislike contradicting themselves the most. Avoidance of potential harm to others is understandable, we cherish our friendships, however the one you are going to avoid harming the least is yourself. It takes a lot of willpower to do otherwise, so chances are - you aren’t going to signal things which are poison to you or your beliefs in the first place.