These are my thoughts after reading chapter 15 of David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity. This is a synthesis of my previous thinking about the mascot and the Memes of our community (and its culture). The intention was to put in the text system concept for MEMS and then design the Mascot’s architectural characteristics.
Mem - information (holon) that has certain characteristics and functions. To be a mem, information must have functions: triggering the holder/recipient to behave in a specific way, which in turn causes the mem to be expressed outside of the holder’s mind, and when it is expressed (by saying something or doing it in a specific way), stacked/accepted/“joined with/to” other holders/recipients, which make this two-steps method be (as one of the primary characteristics of the mem) - replication. Because rthe ecipient can not visually (physically) see an entity of the mem, the mem has chances of mutation during replication. And if that idea won’t be replicated/spread, it can only be called just an idea (this is where we can start to model states of our mem::alpha).
We also term - anecdote, which is “a story with a point”, but only (from the classification of David Deutsch of memes: rational and anti-rational ) as rational memes. In russian culture, we use the term “anecdote” as a joke: mem, but in American/English, it’s just a story that fits much better into our model of memes.
So we can say we have mem (but in the culture it can have synonyms as: idea/anecdote/joke, but with some special characteristics), that we mem classification:
Mem::idea:: class - single copy of an idea that represents hypotheses: replicatable
Mem::mem:: class - >1 successful replication of mem happened, spread.
And we have an architectural characteristic (that we will want to keep an eye on for our successful memes): replicability (how well a meme sticks and how well it transfers, how easy it is to use/activate), evolvability (how much and how likely a meme can change/transform/mutate during replication as it’s spreading), rationality/anti-rational (or we can say how usefull/harmfull it can be for the memes recipient/holder/activator/user).
Also, the Deutsch characterizes/describes the society/ecosystem/environment in which rational and anti-rational memes will thrive: static and dynamic. And the main difference (architectural characteristic) between the two environments is the enabled/disabled creativity. In a dynamic society, we will have an optimal solution by an evolutionary means set of memes moving towards optimal rationality. In a static society, it can only happen if some anti-rational memes dominate for some time and try to stay (non-naturally, irrationally) as a dominating memplex, and won’t allow evolutionary laws to do the process of validation.