I like the thesis statement—good way to pitch EToC.
But I want to unpack exactly what we mean here... so, thinking out loud:
My assumption, prior to reading this, was that there isn't per se a first meme since memes in general emerged from imitative behavior as seen among chimps, who get inspired by each other to copy affordances, but don't do something resembling deliberately faithful transmission (referencing David Deutsch here slightly). And it seems like that *must* still be true insofar as pre-sapiens hominids had memes around how to manage fire for >200k years. And they would have had words (at least names for things and actions, if not also primitive grammar) for a long time as well. (As Genesis says, first man gave name to all the animals, *then* the whole snake fruit thing happened.)
But I think you know all this. So I think something's just getting a bit lost in translation. But if I return to the "Memetic Eve" imagery (which I like) then I note: ah, it's not that there weren't women before Mitochondrial Eve, and it's not that their lines all died out, it's just that *by now* we all have her as ancestor. So likewise it's not that there weren't other memes that are earlier, but that in a sense our current memetic operating system is all in some sense based on some kernel established 10k years ago (although changed substantially since then—perhaps beyond recognition, in the sense that they wouldn't recognize our version of the meme as the same, or we wouldn't recognize theirs).
Unlike animals, who have exactly 1-2 parents, and where there's a definitive answer about whether a given earlier organism is an ancestor, memes can have many "parents" and contributors in different ways: consider a film or story that gets translated into a different language and also weaves in a few local in-jokes. So presumably at least in sense some of those early memes (whether about fire, or words for things) are still around, or they have direct descendants. But do those direct descendants all ALSO descend from this sapience meme? Maybe! There's certainly a tendency for the sapience meme to penetrate most/all other memes since it dramatically changes how we relate to memeplexes (since it changes our sense of self and our sense of choice in relation to memes, as the whole "knowledge of good and evil" reflects).
But it seems to me that we need at least SOME answer to the question of what it means for a meme to be a descendant of another meme, if we're going to make this analogy tight. This is of course very close to the question that ruined the original Memetics field, which died when it couldn't precisely define the equivalent of a gene for memetics.
Oh! Maybe you don't mean that all *memes* are descendants of this foundational meme, just that all people/cultures alive currently have a meme that is some very obvious direct descendant. But also other memes as well. That makes a bit more sense and seems more obviously true. There's a question of whether that's the *last* meme that's spread to everybody, which seems much less obvious, although it could be the most significant in some sense. Makes an interesting analogy to some of the work me & Michael are doing¹ which we've described as being developing a conscious memetic operating system that we would expect to diffuse to everybody (remixed in the process ofc) due to being more fit... and this then gives a new way to articulate the design space that we're working in.
>Oh! Maybe you don't mean that all *memes* are descendants of this foundational meme, just that all people/cultures alive currently have a meme that is some very obvious direct descendant.
Yes, and also that this can solve the Sapient Paradox. Maybe we can workshop the definition I went with:
Memetic Eve: The person to have the first sapient thought and manage to share that with others such that it became the foundation of human culture.
It's having a sapient thought AND sharing it AND that spreading to become the foundation of human culture. This could have happened quite a bit later than the first sapient thought for the reason you get at here:
>So presumably at least in sense some of those early memes (whether about fire, or words for things) are still around, or they have direct descendants. But do those direct descendants all ALSO descend from this sapience meme?
I think that you are exactly right about this dynamic. There were clearly memes about how to make fire or axes a million years ago. But once you have grammatical language, that gets swallowed by whatever comes later. I think something similar could have happened with religion or sapience. There could have been glimmers 100kya. But the spiritual ideas that developed 40-15 kya in Eurasia, and spread after, eclipsed everything else. What I'm trying to get at with these piece is there is a giant mystery about why all these aspects of sapience only seem to be about 10,000 years old, and that them spreading is a very simple solution that makes all sorts of predictions.
>conscious memetic operating system that we would expect to diffuse to everybody
Yes! Exactly. I'm also more sympathetic to missionaries of consciousness the first time around. That's what dreamtime stories sound like, at least. And that's what Eve sounds like.
The first time around (Original Spin) was something like minimum viable consciousness. The first package that made "I am" table stakes.
To what degree do you think spiritual health is memetically fit in 2024? I'm thinking of other examples in history like early christians and muslims and I'm not sure that either of those groups was entirely hinged, tbh. Just wondering what your thoughts are on virality vs goodness. Some meditators, for example, claim 100x improvements with their path, which is over 2,000 years old and has somehow not swept the earth (though, to be fair, it is having its moment now).
> To what degree do you think spiritual health is memetically fit in 2024?
Seems to me that spiritual health isn't particularly memetically fit in the memes-are-tricking-you-into-spreading-them memetic landscape. Those memes (as well-described in [The Toxoplasma of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) ) benefit from keeping their hosts confused, panicked, and angry. And I think many old approaches to spiritual health are *not* memetically fit, and that's how we got here. "Spiritual health" isn't a meme—practices and concepts are. David Deutsch's work on memes is helpful for understanding the different methods by which these memes spread. Highly recommend this essay: [The Evolution of Culture](https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-evolution-of-culture/).
That's a pretty general comment related to "virality vs goodness". But re the more specific question about what's fit at this time...
There appear to me to be larger and larger collectives of people who are recognizing that memes that spread by tricking you suck, that self-coercion sucks, and similar such shifts towards a self-aware spiritual health. (Not to mention the general recognition that people are getting whipped into insanity by listening too much and too uncritically to memes. Pretty much everybody thinks this these days even if they mostly think it's an issue for the people their memes told them to condemn 😅)
So there's a growing appetite for something saner and more wholesome, that can let people safely navigate the wild memetic world we live in now. I don't the path by which these new ideas spread to everybody, but if this fails it won't be because there isn't interest in adopting the ideas but because other systems find the ideas threatening and go after them with violence. The whole point of these memes is to point out to people that it feels better to use memes that don't hijack your own sanity in order to spread.
What I do know is that the current memes we have aren't at all adequate—the process of getting it to everybody will involve improving the memes many times over. That includes creating many more programs for doing "meditation" as traditionally conceived, where people who were turned off by initial meditation approaches find their own way and produce new methods, and the internet gets better and better at directing people towards methods that will work for them rather than wasting their time on methods that don't. And there are more people working on this than I can count.
But we also need more powerful methods than "take these instructions then meditate for 10k hours". Whether those are rituals (like the snake cult thing) or insights (like how the number zero allowed for arabic numerals and way more efficient math, or how phonetic writing systems were 100× easier to learn than logographic ones like hieroglyphs), we need things that can make the transformation possible for entire groups of people, without require years of dedication to a meditation path. Michael and I are working on debugging the basic self-reference/recursion code that seems to be part of the stock cultural OS right now, and finding a bunch of type errors and security flaws, and we anticipate that within some months we'll have a patch that will be convey-able to people in more like minutes-hours-days instead of weeks-months-years. And then some of the people who grok it from us will find new articulations for it, or develop new rituals for sharing it, or whatever. But others will just go back to living their lives, but with a general wave of sanity spreading from them to people they live and work with. How much of a difference will that make? We don't know yet, but it seems like a good start.
> I'm also more sympathetic to missionaries of consciousness the first time around.
I assume you mean sympathetic in the sense of "I can see that being an accurate model of how that happened". And by "missionaries", beyond simply it being memetic, you're speculating that there were people (or peoples, even) whose whole deal was to go around spreading this? As opposed to it having been from more casual diffusion simply happening at the edges of contact between groups that had it and groups that didn't?
Yeah, I can see it having happened, either as part of casual diffusion (where there was an emphasis on sharing rather than conquering) or some taking an interest in sharing the message. I guess to support that it would be interesting to collect examples of missionary efforts. Is it mostly a Christian thing?
I don't know much about missionaryism! I haven't heard of it outside Christianity; other religions seem to more like keep to themselves or conquer, (or maybe gradually subdue other religions at their edges).
I suppose other non-spiritual ideologies get missionary-like sometimes, trying to convert others.
you'll need to take up the meme of close-clade hybridization on as well as a factor now in your cultural taphonomies especially with the other hominins not mentioned in the title
the link here is more for the context about our later hybridization with the non-neandertal relatives (denisovans etc), which is closer to the timeframe you are interested in, and cognitive outcome's becoming more available in the fossil record
> What if all the memes in the human meme pool go back to a single foundational meme?
In the sense that there had to be a *first* meme, yes. And in the sense that consciousness might be in some way itself a meme - that people have to be "switched on" by other people - yes.
But "go back" in the sense of evolutionary (memetic) descent, surely no. Lots of ideas occur independently to people just from looking at the world.
Why "surely" no? I link an article that makes the case that bows and arrows were invented once. Perhaps that's not true of them, but it seems even more likely for something like a creation myth or grammar which involve speaking (spreading) as a matter of course.
Let's take creation myths, what would independent invention predict about what those look like globally?
I like the thesis statement—good way to pitch EToC.
But I want to unpack exactly what we mean here... so, thinking out loud:
My assumption, prior to reading this, was that there isn't per se a first meme since memes in general emerged from imitative behavior as seen among chimps, who get inspired by each other to copy affordances, but don't do something resembling deliberately faithful transmission (referencing David Deutsch here slightly). And it seems like that *must* still be true insofar as pre-sapiens hominids had memes around how to manage fire for >200k years. And they would have had words (at least names for things and actions, if not also primitive grammar) for a long time as well. (As Genesis says, first man gave name to all the animals, *then* the whole snake fruit thing happened.)
But I think you know all this. So I think something's just getting a bit lost in translation. But if I return to the "Memetic Eve" imagery (which I like) then I note: ah, it's not that there weren't women before Mitochondrial Eve, and it's not that their lines all died out, it's just that *by now* we all have her as ancestor. So likewise it's not that there weren't other memes that are earlier, but that in a sense our current memetic operating system is all in some sense based on some kernel established 10k years ago (although changed substantially since then—perhaps beyond recognition, in the sense that they wouldn't recognize our version of the meme as the same, or we wouldn't recognize theirs).
Unlike animals, who have exactly 1-2 parents, and where there's a definitive answer about whether a given earlier organism is an ancestor, memes can have many "parents" and contributors in different ways: consider a film or story that gets translated into a different language and also weaves in a few local in-jokes. So presumably at least in sense some of those early memes (whether about fire, or words for things) are still around, or they have direct descendants. But do those direct descendants all ALSO descend from this sapience meme? Maybe! There's certainly a tendency for the sapience meme to penetrate most/all other memes since it dramatically changes how we relate to memeplexes (since it changes our sense of self and our sense of choice in relation to memes, as the whole "knowledge of good and evil" reflects).
But it seems to me that we need at least SOME answer to the question of what it means for a meme to be a descendant of another meme, if we're going to make this analogy tight. This is of course very close to the question that ruined the original Memetics field, which died when it couldn't precisely define the equivalent of a gene for memetics.
Oh! Maybe you don't mean that all *memes* are descendants of this foundational meme, just that all people/cultures alive currently have a meme that is some very obvious direct descendant. But also other memes as well. That makes a bit more sense and seems more obviously true. There's a question of whether that's the *last* meme that's spread to everybody, which seems much less obvious, although it could be the most significant in some sense. Makes an interesting analogy to some of the work me & Michael are doing¹ which we've described as being developing a conscious memetic operating system that we would expect to diffuse to everybody (remixed in the process ofc) due to being more fit... and this then gives a new way to articulate the design space that we're working in.
¹ for readers who are curious about this, see this interview we did with Andrew https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/malcolm-ocean-and-michael-smith-3 or this shorter vid introducing the project: https://youtu.be/NeN34rquMhY
>Oh! Maybe you don't mean that all *memes* are descendants of this foundational meme, just that all people/cultures alive currently have a meme that is some very obvious direct descendant.
Yes, and also that this can solve the Sapient Paradox. Maybe we can workshop the definition I went with:
Memetic Eve: The person to have the first sapient thought and manage to share that with others such that it became the foundation of human culture.
It's having a sapient thought AND sharing it AND that spreading to become the foundation of human culture. This could have happened quite a bit later than the first sapient thought for the reason you get at here:
>So presumably at least in sense some of those early memes (whether about fire, or words for things) are still around, or they have direct descendants. But do those direct descendants all ALSO descend from this sapience meme?
I think that you are exactly right about this dynamic. There were clearly memes about how to make fire or axes a million years ago. But once you have grammatical language, that gets swallowed by whatever comes later. I think something similar could have happened with religion or sapience. There could have been glimmers 100kya. But the spiritual ideas that developed 40-15 kya in Eurasia, and spread after, eclipsed everything else. What I'm trying to get at with these piece is there is a giant mystery about why all these aspects of sapience only seem to be about 10,000 years old, and that them spreading is a very simple solution that makes all sorts of predictions.
>conscious memetic operating system that we would expect to diffuse to everybody
Yes! Exactly. I'm also more sympathetic to missionaries of consciousness the first time around. That's what dreamtime stories sound like, at least. And that's what Eve sounds like.
The first time around (Original Spin) was something like minimum viable consciousness. The first package that made "I am" table stakes.
To what degree do you think spiritual health is memetically fit in 2024? I'm thinking of other examples in history like early christians and muslims and I'm not sure that either of those groups was entirely hinged, tbh. Just wondering what your thoughts are on virality vs goodness. Some meditators, for example, claim 100x improvements with their path, which is over 2,000 years old and has somehow not swept the earth (though, to be fair, it is having its moment now).
> To what degree do you think spiritual health is memetically fit in 2024?
Seems to me that spiritual health isn't particularly memetically fit in the memes-are-tricking-you-into-spreading-them memetic landscape. Those memes (as well-described in [The Toxoplasma of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) ) benefit from keeping their hosts confused, panicked, and angry. And I think many old approaches to spiritual health are *not* memetically fit, and that's how we got here. "Spiritual health" isn't a meme—practices and concepts are. David Deutsch's work on memes is helpful for understanding the different methods by which these memes spread. Highly recommend this essay: [The Evolution of Culture](https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-evolution-of-culture/).
That's a pretty general comment related to "virality vs goodness". But re the more specific question about what's fit at this time...
There appear to me to be larger and larger collectives of people who are recognizing that memes that spread by tricking you suck, that self-coercion sucks, and similar such shifts towards a self-aware spiritual health. (Not to mention the general recognition that people are getting whipped into insanity by listening too much and too uncritically to memes. Pretty much everybody thinks this these days even if they mostly think it's an issue for the people their memes told them to condemn 😅)
So there's a growing appetite for something saner and more wholesome, that can let people safely navigate the wild memetic world we live in now. I don't the path by which these new ideas spread to everybody, but if this fails it won't be because there isn't interest in adopting the ideas but because other systems find the ideas threatening and go after them with violence. The whole point of these memes is to point out to people that it feels better to use memes that don't hijack your own sanity in order to spread.
What I do know is that the current memes we have aren't at all adequate—the process of getting it to everybody will involve improving the memes many times over. That includes creating many more programs for doing "meditation" as traditionally conceived, where people who were turned off by initial meditation approaches find their own way and produce new methods, and the internet gets better and better at directing people towards methods that will work for them rather than wasting their time on methods that don't. And there are more people working on this than I can count.
But we also need more powerful methods than "take these instructions then meditate for 10k hours". Whether those are rituals (like the snake cult thing) or insights (like how the number zero allowed for arabic numerals and way more efficient math, or how phonetic writing systems were 100× easier to learn than logographic ones like hieroglyphs), we need things that can make the transformation possible for entire groups of people, without require years of dedication to a meditation path. Michael and I are working on debugging the basic self-reference/recursion code that seems to be part of the stock cultural OS right now, and finding a bunch of type errors and security flaws, and we anticipate that within some months we'll have a patch that will be convey-able to people in more like minutes-hours-days instead of weeks-months-years. And then some of the people who grok it from us will find new articulations for it, or develop new rituals for sharing it, or whatever. But others will just go back to living their lives, but with a general wave of sanity spreading from them to people they live and work with. How much of a difference will that make? We don't know yet, but it seems like a good start.
That's my rough theory of change, on this level.
> I'm also more sympathetic to missionaries of consciousness the first time around.
I assume you mean sympathetic in the sense of "I can see that being an accurate model of how that happened". And by "missionaries", beyond simply it being memetic, you're speculating that there were people (or peoples, even) whose whole deal was to go around spreading this? As opposed to it having been from more casual diffusion simply happening at the edges of contact between groups that had it and groups that didn't?
Yeah, I can see it having happened, either as part of casual diffusion (where there was an emphasis on sharing rather than conquering) or some taking an interest in sharing the message. I guess to support that it would be interesting to collect examples of missionary efforts. Is it mostly a Christian thing?
I don't know much about missionaryism! I haven't heard of it outside Christianity; other religions seem to more like keep to themselves or conquer, (or maybe gradually subdue other religions at their edges).
I suppose other non-spiritual ideologies get missionary-like sometimes, trying to convert others.
Arh, you goose! dear old friend.
have to steal that reference meme
you'll need to take up the meme of close-clade hybridization on as well as a factor now in your cultural taphonomies especially with the other hominins not mentioned in the title
https://youtu.be/pbtHsR_i81s?si=D6i5HAn5K8AZqzTP
That video looks interesting, always fascinating when cognitive traits show up as Neanderthal adaptations
the link here is more for the context about our later hybridization with the non-neandertal relatives (denisovans etc), which is closer to the timeframe you are interested in, and cognitive outcome's becoming more available in the fossil record
> What if all the memes in the human meme pool go back to a single foundational meme?
In the sense that there had to be a *first* meme, yes. And in the sense that consciousness might be in some way itself a meme - that people have to be "switched on" by other people - yes.
But "go back" in the sense of evolutionary (memetic) descent, surely no. Lots of ideas occur independently to people just from looking at the world.
Why "surely" no? I link an article that makes the case that bows and arrows were invented once. Perhaps that's not true of them, but it seems even more likely for something like a creation myth or grammar which involve speaking (spreading) as a matter of course.
Let's take creation myths, what would independent invention predict about what those look like globally?
I agree that some ideas were invented only once. I'm saying some ideas were reinvented many times.