Fascinating! There are some aspects you've touched on that I've never considered. I'd love to record a call and publish it to help us both expand our ideas about psychofauna.
I'm not really sure I understand how you are using the term 'psychofauna' here differently than 'memeplex', i.e., ideas that live in minds and instantiate themselves in bodies.
I suppose that 'memeplex' is a collection of interconnected memes that work together to enhance their collective survival and replication.
Whereas 'psychofauna', by contrast, are where memes are seen as organisms that interact with 'hosts', environments, and other ideas within a system; which is a more ecological view that is concerned with adaptations, co-location, bundling, etc.
Does that imply that replication/propagation is only one characteristic of psychofauna? Or that psychofauna are describing something that is not just about pure transmission and quantity?
Maybe memeplex : spirit :: psychofauna :: (lower g) god. Every god certainly possesses an animating spirit, but I think you would agree that a god is more substantial than a spirit. That is to say a god/psychofauna is associated with more depth of agency or qualitative presence than the pure motion or quantitative notion of a spirit/memeplex?
For example, is "democracy" more of a memeplex or a psychofauna? Certainly in some ways the notion of democracy treated merely as a means to organize, decide, and take action. But, in other ways, it is treated as a type of ritual with and underlying sacredness that ought to be attended to with reverence and gratitude.
Can the same "thing" instantiate as both a memeplex and a psychofauna? Do memeplexes that stay around eventually become psychofauna with a fuller, more weighty body?
Good question. I should admit that I am not too confident I have the ‘correct’ way of differentiating these things, but let’s have a go.
I think the meme/memeplex refers more to the content of the idea (although not necessarily exclusively) whereas psychofauna refers more to the idea as an evolving entity with a ‘lifecycle’.
So ‘democracy’ has both aspects (I basically think all ideas have—just different ways of analyzing the same thing).
I think the “body” of the psychofauna is the presence of the idea in the brain (or maybe in AI too?). Since I’m not sure we understand exactly how ideas live in brains I’m not too sure about the biology of psychofauna.
The reason I am interested in this particular perspective is that applying theories of biological reproduction to ideas might be enlightening. Specifically, and I will write more about this soon, I am interested in the difference between k and r strategy psychofauna.
I have this feeling like my writing is terrible and boring on this topic (mainly because my thinking is muddled). But I think there’s something hidden in there.
I'd take a more Hegelian line. Ideas like capitalism etc. are in a constant state of flux, encountering their opposites and being transformed. For an idea to persevere and avoid being "sublated," as Hegel would say, it has to find a way to slow down or stop the dialectic. And so far the most effective method they've come up with is the echo chamber. Free speech speeds up the dialectic; echo chambers freeze it.
I agree with the free speech/echo chamber characterization here.
But all living entities have both ways of preserving the form and changing it...DNA + mutations are the most obvious.
And there are many ways that ideas resist change, such as writing an idea down. This helps it spread, but it also fixes it in a certain form (although others will probably then modify it in their brain and write a different version).
Why would writing it down help? You can write down words but their meanings stay in flux. People think that written constitutions are living, breathing documents. And they are. But so is everything else. Meaning is relational: when everything around a document changes, the document's meaning changes too.
Of course writing things down doesn't fix meaning *completely*, but it does a better job of keeping meaning stable than verbal communication (and a hell of a lot better than non-verbal communication of ideas).
And yes, meaning is relational. Words are compressed encodings that are expanded and understood based on context. But you could say something similar about DNA/bodies. DNA must be expressed in a context, which might not be as complex as the psychological environment, but it's complex and hence bodies would change over time even if DNA doesn't. And yet we can group and organize living beings based on DNA and trace common forms to common DNA.
Fascinating! There are some aspects you've touched on that I've never considered. I'd love to record a call and publish it to help us both expand our ideas about psychofauna.
Would love to!
I'm not really sure I understand how you are using the term 'psychofauna' here differently than 'memeplex', i.e., ideas that live in minds and instantiate themselves in bodies.
I suppose that 'memeplex' is a collection of interconnected memes that work together to enhance their collective survival and replication.
Whereas 'psychofauna', by contrast, are where memes are seen as organisms that interact with 'hosts', environments, and other ideas within a system; which is a more ecological view that is concerned with adaptations, co-location, bundling, etc.
Does that imply that replication/propagation is only one characteristic of psychofauna? Or that psychofauna are describing something that is not just about pure transmission and quantity?
Maybe memeplex : spirit :: psychofauna :: (lower g) god. Every god certainly possesses an animating spirit, but I think you would agree that a god is more substantial than a spirit. That is to say a god/psychofauna is associated with more depth of agency or qualitative presence than the pure motion or quantitative notion of a spirit/memeplex?
For example, is "democracy" more of a memeplex or a psychofauna? Certainly in some ways the notion of democracy treated merely as a means to organize, decide, and take action. But, in other ways, it is treated as a type of ritual with and underlying sacredness that ought to be attended to with reverence and gratitude.
Can the same "thing" instantiate as both a memeplex and a psychofauna? Do memeplexes that stay around eventually become psychofauna with a fuller, more weighty body?
Good question. I should admit that I am not too confident I have the ‘correct’ way of differentiating these things, but let’s have a go.
I think the meme/memeplex refers more to the content of the idea (although not necessarily exclusively) whereas psychofauna refers more to the idea as an evolving entity with a ‘lifecycle’.
So ‘democracy’ has both aspects (I basically think all ideas have—just different ways of analyzing the same thing).
I think the “body” of the psychofauna is the presence of the idea in the brain (or maybe in AI too?). Since I’m not sure we understand exactly how ideas live in brains I’m not too sure about the biology of psychofauna.
The reason I am interested in this particular perspective is that applying theories of biological reproduction to ideas might be enlightening. Specifically, and I will write more about this soon, I am interested in the difference between k and r strategy psychofauna.
I have this feeling like my writing is terrible and boring on this topic (mainly because my thinking is muddled). But I think there’s something hidden in there.
I'd take a more Hegelian line. Ideas like capitalism etc. are in a constant state of flux, encountering their opposites and being transformed. For an idea to persevere and avoid being "sublated," as Hegel would say, it has to find a way to slow down or stop the dialectic. And so far the most effective method they've come up with is the echo chamber. Free speech speeds up the dialectic; echo chambers freeze it.
I agree with the free speech/echo chamber characterization here.
But all living entities have both ways of preserving the form and changing it...DNA + mutations are the most obvious.
And there are many ways that ideas resist change, such as writing an idea down. This helps it spread, but it also fixes it in a certain form (although others will probably then modify it in their brain and write a different version).
Why would writing it down help? You can write down words but their meanings stay in flux. People think that written constitutions are living, breathing documents. And they are. But so is everything else. Meaning is relational: when everything around a document changes, the document's meaning changes too.
Of course writing things down doesn't fix meaning *completely*, but it does a better job of keeping meaning stable than verbal communication (and a hell of a lot better than non-verbal communication of ideas).
And yes, meaning is relational. Words are compressed encodings that are expanded and understood based on context. But you could say something similar about DNA/bodies. DNA must be expressed in a context, which might not be as complex as the psychological environment, but it's complex and hence bodies would change over time even if DNA doesn't. And yet we can group and organize living beings based on DNA and trace common forms to common DNA.