Natural selection, the free market and memes

SELF-PERPETUATING SYSTEMS AND HOW THEY'RE ALL SIMILAR

Theoretical post

I'm sure if you've been here for longer than a week, you understand the basic reasoning and concepts behind natural selection, the free market, military success, and so on. For the longest time now I've had this feeling that there is some very similar underlying process at here, but all of the existing definitions for selection processes like this are overspecialized for their particular field, and generally lack applicability to other types of systems. So I decided to have a go at it myself.

I define a SELF PERPETUATING SYSTEM to be any pattern, function, whatever, that takes some variables about the real world and changes them in a way that affects the existence of the system itself. See pictures for reasoning. The goal is to arrive at the shared underlying process of real life selection processes like competition, natural selection, survival etc. Then we can see what kinds of other things we can apply this to.

I included some examples of how given systems can be analyzed like this. Of course there can be systems made of systems and systems inside systems, which is why for any particular application you need to come up with a seperate architecture.

I'm sure there are things I'm overlooking right now, but it seems like this model can be used to describe a lot of things - individual survival, group natural selection, the success of businesses, etc.

If you can get people to think about certain things this way, it makes much clearer how the notions of natural selection, market forces and so on apply to many situations outside the usual fields associated with them. This should make it more difficult for leftards to plead that natural selection doesn't apply to ethnic groups, religions, ideologies and so on.

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Other urls found in this thread:

anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/
pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

If anybody works or studies in a field where someone has modelled this before, you're welcome to link existing models. I don't think I've seen a general approach for this particular problem before.

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Are you retarded? What the fuck does this have to do with capitalism? How about you look at the actual post, faggot. If your IQ is below 115 this thread probably isn't for you.
I switched devices.

An addendum to the OP:
The reason genes are not considered a supersystem of organisms is that the expression of each gene is linked to a particular organism, there is no direct information sharing. We track all the copies of this single system, not any single one of them.

I am not talking about any political or economic systems in this thread. I am trying to establish a somewhat rigorous, systematic way of thinking about systems that behave this way, from genes to companies to nation states to religions. To do this we need a model.

Once we have a model, a lot of the semantic amniguity goes away, and you can have an argument without constantly latching onto vaguely defined terms.

Sounds like von Neumann machines with genetic algorithms.

When this thread matures, copy the good stuff to /bmw/ since this falls under their purview.

A von neumann machine can be described with this self-perpetuating system model. Just like a biological organism, a gene, a meme, a race and so on. That's the whole point of the model.

Well, I hope somebody has some input here. This thread isn't particularly well adapted to increased board throughput.

Zig Forums is more an application board than a theory board.

It's neither and both. We're a sort of open source, anonymous equivalent to a cross between a political think tank and an NGO. There is plenty of theoretical discussion here, it's just much slower than the ADD news/bait/D&C threads. Besides, we aren't doing many active ops these days.

What is the purpose of this thread?

If the point of this thread is to theorize how certain ideas and processes are self-perpetuating systems in order to convince lefts they are wrong its a fruitless endeavor. Logic is not part of their thinking process, and any kind of proof or process will go over most of their heads. We live in an age where your message must be short, emotional and impactful for anyone to listen to you.

9/10 OP.
Will save for later.
Would you mind me using this in a book?

Discussion, preferably anons attempting to pick the model apart or contributing to it.

I want to come up with a way of thinking about complex systems like memes, communities, races, ethnic groups, etc that isn't overly reliant on inaccurate terminology borrowed from other fields. Right now most Zig Forumsacks seem to have an intuitive understanding of the processes that shape society and history, but there are a lot of misconceptions, inaccurate assumptions and simple inability to adequately explain one's reasoning floating around.

If you can look at a given system and reduce it to a reasonably good abstract model, you can reason about its behaviour much more easily. Instead of saying "natural selection applies to religions", for example, you can construct a model of a religion using the tools provided in the OP and see how it is different from an organism and how it is similar.

Absolutely not, if you think it is good spread it far and wide. It's the result of my personal attempt to make sense of that "natural selection" pattern that keeps cropping up everywhere.

Logic is part of their thinking process, they just seek to maximize different parameters and they make axiomatic assumptions that do not hold true for the real world.

I am not trying to convince anybody, just make a tool for people to use when analyzing systems of this type with these properties.

You want to formally define these systems but if you are not able to (or don't want to) casually understand why certain things work this way then there isn't much that can be done. If you don't have eyes you can't read a book, no matter how well the concept of a book is abstracted to the fundamentals for you?

You miss the point of the thread. I am not using this as some meme to spread, but as a framework for more specific analysis. What does this have to do with leftists?

In order to reason about what a meme is, how it spreads and propagates you first need to define what a meme is and what its properties are. Logic is a set of allowed operations conducted on a set of intitial conditions. I'm trying to arrive at a framework that can do this for complex self-perpetuating systems. You could try to model the meme as the individual firings of neurons inside the brains of all the people exposed to it, or you could abstract and seek to create a model that approximates a meme well. Our entire understanding of the world is just a bunch of assumed models with different levels of granularity. You just don't think about the fact that what you think of as the "spoon" or the "dog" is just a huge fuzzy mess of excitations in some underlying fundamental fields. Because that's not a practically useful model. Instead you reach a level of abstraction where the effort and predictive values are at their sweetspot.

I noticed, and I am sure many others here have too, that there is an evolution-like pattern in many, many more things than just biological life or genetics. So I am trying to distill it out for more general applicability.

Machines and consumer products within capitalism? I think I see what you mean. You could write a book on such, I'm surprised there is not already a field dealing with this phenomenon.

So I think I see one thing that is very important and was overlooked by me - the PROPOGATION of the system. Turns out it can mean different things when we analyze different systems.

When looking at the spread of things like memes and genes the system propagates by creating copies of itself, while something like an organized religion propagates by coopting more substrate systems for the same instance of the system. Furthermore, biological reproduction also creates the instance of the substrate system it is hosted by, while memetic reproduction integrates into an existing system. Copies exhibit mutations - changes in the system from instance to instance. Mutation rate is dependent on the mode of copy creation. A fairly direct process like gene transcription will have low rates of mutation, while the spread of memes has many intermediary systems that introduce error, resulting in high mutation rate.

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Well, it has so far lacked direct applicability, but as things like AIs become more and more common, and we develop the computing power to track and simulate the extremely complex "chaotic" systems in life like memes and organizations, some sort of formal model becomes a requirement. It's only the past few decades that the broader applicability of the selection process has become apparent, but I think it's time to recognize natural selection as just one of a family of related processes.

Hence the broader definition: Over time, systems S whose output Y results in conditions Z become more prevalent.

you are looking for recursion user. you now understand generacy and degeneracy.

also hope you watched westworld.

an algorithm designed to survive and sophisticated enough to think it is in control.

Humans are herd and pack animals to an extent. When in a sufficiently large group they defer to others to make decisions for them, and those leaders put aside most of their personal choices for the best of the group.
To this extant any group becomes something of an individual in its own right. We see personifications of this all the time from Russian bears to Uncle Sam and Athena. In some cases, as with DC comics, you have biological processes emulated by the comics and heroes more far reaching acts.
Memetics are the largest group activity on Earth, barring language, and so I posit that any sufficiently large meme will inevitably begin to emulate human activity. Well, could be percieved as such. Pepe and Wojak being good case studies for memes that resisted irrelevance and persisted, causing something of a Cambrian Explosion in varieties. A truly successful self-perpetuating system will kill off its competition while creating 'offspring' system of alike, but not identical, structure.

Another example, shareware games almost died out with thr advent of higher budget studio works. Come Digital Extremes, the director had started up and remembered that memeplex well. Warframe started as one of the first modern 'free to play' console games and over iterations refined the model. It, being a good example of bang for your buck microtransactions, is actively damaging AAA games like Destiny. Now AAA is almost forced to imitate DE's model in games like Anthem.

Damn OP, I'd had similar thoughts in the past but your highbrow diagrams make it look official.

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Westworld was jewy though.

Well, those seem to be fairly broad concepts. Has anybody applied them to things like this? How would they fit in with my autistic attempt at modelling things?
So would the active selection rule be a degenerate case of both natural selection and the survival of a business in a competitive environment? I'm not all that familiar with higher math, best I can do is calculus lol.
So the idea here is that a self-perpetuating system is a recursive function? I guess that makes sense but by just leaving it at that we don't have any kind of structure. I'm trying to come up with something I can apply to real systems and maybe get some useful parameters out of. See , where I looked into how different systems propagate. By using the same basic framework one can arrive at a model for some fairly different things. It's all obviously a work in progress.

My highbrow meme diagrams are just symbols I came up with to give some sort of visual intuition to what I'm tryiny to say. They're still WIP and likely not optimal. I don't even know if what I'm trying to do has already been done by some amphetamine overdosing mathematician in some obscure department somewhere.

what does this have to do with politics???

mods can we move this?

Literally everything you dumb cuck. Just like race threads, religion threads and science threads, this has a place on the board. I am trying to approach the analysis of the things the field of politics is based around and exists to solve.

If you want to understand how it all comes together you need some sort of formalized approach. Right now every field more complex (higher abstraction) than biology is a mess of heuristics, the occasional theoretical insight and a whole lot of unstructured data. If you want to REASON about shit like intergroup ethnic competition, you need to define the things you're talking about first.

It's got plenty to do with politics. Applying this to party politics explains the adoption of talking points and lobbying groups. Self feeding systems. Currently the largest and most extensive self-perpetuating memeplex in politics is the military-industrial complex. So large that the American cultural empire latched on and was carried around as a by-product.

Well if you want to you can model any complex system with this. It actually explains why self-perpetuating systems emerge since the systems that tend to self-perpetuate, well, perpetuate. Natural selection becomes borderline tautological if you think about things this way.

Strategies that propelled life into complexity surely have some analog in self-perpetuating systems.

Two of these aren't wholly relevant, but the idea is there. Right now we're at the multicellular life with rudimentary light detection, touch sensitivity, rudimentary jaws. The second an AI pulls together a gestalt opinion will be the first 'central nervous system'. Oh wait, we had Tai.
I'm sure you can see how /cow/ is like a lamprey, and that while imageboards as a whole are filter feeders we still keep our teeth sharp and our eyes forward in case some whale shows weakness.

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Why do Godless leftist commie kikes that masturbate about evolution but always have poor genes witnessed by bad vision and wearing glasses? Are they trying to fall back on authoritarianism to circumvent natural selection which they know has doomed them to being shit out of the asshole of evolution?

Well, you can model Zig Forums, or the internet in general, or any connected/vaguely structured group of people as a system of this type. It's what I set out to do with this whole thing. I'll try to make some examples and tweak the basic assumptions as needed until I get something that I can start to meaningfully parametrize. It took a while for me to figure out that in order for the structure to make sense you need to seperate the immediate "life" conditions as well as conditions that govern some overall modes of operation, seperate from "inputs" that a system processes. A brain is heavily influenced by the physical variable of "not being smashed by extreme acceleration" but it's not something that really means much for what we are trying to look at here.

Same with outputs being changes to the set of all variables in the world state instead of just seperate variables. That lets us define a somewhat rigid condition of when a system is "alive" - still actively producing changes to the environment.

The degradation of eyesight probably is something else than genes user. China is getting it worse and worse every year for example.
Goodness knows my sight was great right until I became a bookworm. Here is a generation raised on smartphones and ipads.

As for the rest, probable but unconsciously.

either bot post or brainlet derail attempt, I can't tell

The existence of glasses and agricultural society in general eliminates or at least reduces the selective pressures against bad eyesight. This explains increased prevalence. As for why leftards have glasses, it mostly boils down to intellectuals who are physically unfit or weak being more attracted to leftard egalitarian/technocratic views.

But in the spirit of this thread you can model it as a change to the organism function as per

that improves the quality of the X input data, allowing the decision making systems in the organism system to produce outputs Y that result in better conditions Z.

So who's the brainlet now (16) nigger?

Good thread OP.

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Yeah I'm basically trying to make a sort of notation for breaking down systems like this. Once it's reasonably general and established it can be used to start to model particulars, like the kike media-finance-academia triad, your typical Soros-NGO, antifa cells, communist propaganda memes, etc.

If I or others can figure out how best to describe the architecture of each system in a meaningful way, and arrive at a set of parameters useful for each particular application, we can create a sort of symbolic language for analyzing, categorizing and predicting the behaviour of many superficially very different systems. Sort of like an application-specific branch of math for Zig Forums.

FUCKING BUMP FOR AUTIST WIN

CONDENSE WORDS TO CONDENSE ENERGY AND WIN

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Polemic Memetics
Might want to look into gaseous/plasma physics or mold/fungal and root growth, considering how ideas spread.
Plenty of numbers on know your meme and google analytics to test rates of infection and deflection.

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I'm glad to see someone here taking the time to take a crack at formalizing memetics and complex optimization systems. This field is probably the most important knowledge base to have going into the upcoming wave of information warfare, so it'd be good to have like minds on the same page (or at least speaking the same language).

Just a few thoughts from what I've seen in the thread so far:

All in all good work so far, I'll be curious to see where you go with this OP.

Spiral power is a real thing

Good thread. Thank you OP and contributors, keep it up.

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Heh I think I actually tried to do meme theormodynamics a year or so back but it didn't go very far and I was too busy. I'm taking a bit of a different angle now, all about sets and functions as mappings between sets.

I've sorta halfass deduced a pattern between the different types of system propagation, the degree of structure in a family of memes, adaptibility and hysteresis, will try to make a meme picture tomorrow because it will all sound like incomprehensible ramblings otherwise.

The distinction between what is an intelligent system and what isn't can be quite fuzzy. I included the reward function Q as an optional thing because things like computers or businesses can have external objectives that affect their outputs regardless of the fitness function Z, while still being perfectly compatible with being viewed as a sort of self perpetuating system if needed.

I guess fitness function is a nice name. I tried to keep the X out of the S() for clarity in my own head but I guess we can just put it in. I originally tried to somehow do it with just X inputs but realized it doesn't give a very good idea of what's going on beyond the most general terms so I iteratively added and removed a bunch of things till it made a reasonable degree of sense.

I'll try to make some more specific deductions/applications and see how well it goes. The number 1 goal here is to arrive at an approach to formalizing complex systems that gives us some useful parameters to latch on to and quantify.
Yeah, obviously. So obviously, in fact, that I figure it's easier to just abstract all the substrate specific shit into the substrate function and account for the net effects unless finer granularity is needed for some application, for which I plan to expand this form to include more types of interaction and communication.
Of course. Right now we're at the barest bones, the core ideas and a few basic applications. I need to get my bearings by trying all this out to describe actual systems we are fairly familiar with, and see how it goes.
Of course. You're welcome to contribute directly if you feel this is going in the right direction, of course. I'll try to churn some stuff like this sort of analysis on a few institutions.

We're in the depths of poetry dressed as flowcharts and formulas, it will be comprehensible and rambling.

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For this it would probably be helpful to reference how fitness functions as used by computers are built. In general you're going to have 3 components - the current configuration (which for clarity we can separate into Z, the inherited configuration state, and X, the immediate configuration state); the goal configuration space Q, which is some subset of all possible configurations of the system; and the result of the function Y, generally determined via heuristic. In short, Y = S(X,Z,Q). Usually a fitness function doesn't return a child configuration in Y the way you have it modeled, but rather a score of how close the current state is to the goal space.

The creation of the set of child configurations is handled via a separate function which operates from a uniform process with semi-random features (e.g. sexual reproduction can produce offspring for living organisms with occasional mutations, but it does not decide how fit that organism is to survive). I'm not certain, but would be inclined to think that memetic systems operate in much the same way - propagation is performed largely through small regular modifications to a small pool of OC with a dash of occasional creativity, and the population of actors the meme is exposed to decides whether the meme lives or dies in a process disjoint from the meme's conception.

I think this is more just a matter of taking into account the features and limitations of the system's working environment. It's easy to model system activities on the "bare metal" of reality since you only need to keep in mind the laws of physics, but doing so an abstraction layer or two up you'll have to take into account the context your system exists in, since even simple memetic constructs like "words" only possess any meaning at all in the context of their hosts.

The interplay between subsystems and supersystems is probably going to be immensely complicated to model out, though, so maybe it is better to just gloss over it for now. Still, it might not be a good idea to tackle something like religion or nationalism for a while, given the system dependencies there are going to look positively schizophrenic.

I'll be happy to give feedback but my artistic and organizational skills are not the best. You're definitely on to something, though, so keep up the good work!

OP isn't a fag anymore.
I' sure we can use general system theory to define basic phenomena we commonly use here, and what I'll offer are just generic definitions; as we progress we can find more detailed definitions.

Good stuff, OP.

One thing I would add, is the dynamic of r/k selection theory. If any anons haven't given this article a read yet, it's one of the requisite pieces of Zig Forums literature: anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/

The way I see it, you're trying find the naturalistic processes by which optimization functions are selected. This is a topic that, I would argue, is almost impenetrable to people that do not believe in an objective reality, ie leftists. Those that recognize the existence of objective criteria/standards are the only ones that have a chance of contributing anything worthwhile to the matter.

I would bet that actuaries would have models that could provide us some insight, for their entire purpose is to generate formulae/standards for optimization functions. Come to think of it, I wonder if any actuary literature has incorporated r/k selection theory.

Yeah that's the problem. I am trying to model systems that do not necessarily have a goal. The Q term is to account for the types that do but I am more interested in the perpetuation aspect - how the outputs affect the future state of the function itself. The goal is to model "dumb" self perpetuating systems not just actors.
If we're tracking the spread of a subsystem all we really care about are the direct net effects the substrate function has on child instances. The whole problem is one of finding the right amount of granularity for the task. We want to abstract as much of the complexity away as possible but still end up with a model that has predictive value.
The beauty of abstractions, statistics and probability is thay by finding the right structure, we can often get the significant figures right by only accounting for a fraction of the complexity.

I'm thinking using simplistic first order approximations for broad predictions about a system (it will be fast/slow to adapt compared to this other system architecture, it will mutate quickly/slowly, it will encounter inefficiencies in x and y and z situations, shit like that).

ended post on accident

…and then coming up with more complex approximations as we learn more about it and what works

Yeah, coming up with somewhat rigorous definitions for these things would clear up a lot of confusion. Besides, I'm sure many of the autists here are highly visuo-spatially oriented so some charts always help.

Reading through that and I already see a limitation in the basic definitions. The view of the simplest type of system as "state maintaining" is misleading and bad form for definitions. A system doesn't need to have any explicit purpose, whether or not it lasts is up to the environment and the changes it produces.

A lot of the work that has gone into systems analysis has been from the point of view of computer scientists, trying to analyze automated devices. I guess I'm trying to extend it a bit by looking at stuff that doesn't have any defineable reward function/goal paremeters.

You don't need a gene or a table to have some sort of purpose to model it, but you can measure how adapted it is to the environment around it anyway by how long it keeps being the same system with meaningful interactions with the environment. We cannot model genetics or even memetics while assuming the systems we are analyzing must have a goal parameter.

Otherwise it's a good read.

Ok this is an example of how I intend to use this. Here I take crack at approximating an organization/structure as a communication protocol built inside instances of some meme that is part of multiple substrate systems.

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This kind of ties back into what I had first said back in . A "goalless" propagation system - natural selection - can only exist in the context of non-agency. As soon as you involve an intelligent actor at any level, though, you unavoidably incorporate that actor's goals - unlike what the leftists would tell you, any system created by humans always serves some purpose (if not of itself, then to satisfy some goal of its creator or host). At that point we are now operating under an artificial selection paradigm, and the fitness of the system with respect to that purpose will be evaluated even if the actors involved aren't consciously aware of their decisions.

If you plan on starting out with a non-goal oriented system, I'd suggest starting by modeling out natural selection of living organisms in its sexual and asexual variants. You'll quickly notice that the function that creates child instances makes absolutely no determination about the value of those child instances; it simply fabricates a child population from the properties of the parent population using a simple regular process, throws it at the walls of reality, and anything that sticks gets to be a part of the next parent population. The net change to the population comes from the separate function of those children either surviving to reproduce or not, and is only exhibited across generations.

While I agree with the notion of individual instances of memes operating disjointly in the context of their hosts, I disagree with the idea that each meme has its own separate communications protocol. At least for human memetic systems, what you actually have is a shared communications protocol consisting of a limited number of signaling options - utterances, gestures, symbols, etc. - all used in common by every memeplex. The meme simply ascribes or overloads a subset of those signals with new conceptual meaning, and that subset may differ from host to host depending on the configuration of their instance of the meme. In essence the signals are being processed back down the system stack into their environment rather than up into a separate abstraction layer for signaling.

That said I can still agree with the definitions of mutation, throughput, hysteresis and adaptivity because we are still using a shared communications protocol. It's just that by having a broader scope for the protocol we can accommodate things like "bleedover", where mutations to one meme can cause mutations to other memes in the same host using shared signals as their mutation vector.

Looking at the diagrams I wonder if the software notion of versioning would be useful here. A mutation would be something along the lines of the meme being updated to a new version. That way you don't have to worry about the idea of a meme "changing its properties" since it is instead being wholly replaced by the new version (whether it retains some of its old properties or not), and backpropagation would no longer need to be a thing - it would instead be a new version of the meme being pushed to a different host and overriding their previous version.

I do not claim this. I claim that STRUCTURED memes have additional protocol, on top of what already comes with the substrate. Consider things like hierachy, events, decision making proesses, etc. You can model that as a seperate layer included with the idea of the organization - the structure of how it is supposed to work.

You can break each system into smaller and smaller chunks, the question is whether you want to for that particular application. Do you need to keep track of all the idiosyncracies of human social interaction to adequately model the spread of some religion or ideology compared to another? I don't know, but I hope to find out somehow. Trying, making models and hypotheses and then testing them is the only way to check these kinds of things. Remeber, this is an inductive process. We create a logical system with the goal of having it approximate a real world system to some arbitrary degree of precision.
I don't think there is that fundametal a difference. A goal-driven system simply has another dimension we can analyze, how it tries to maximize a certain variable or other in the environment. But the basics of self-propagation still apply. The way I see it, with similar enough notation and basic assumptions we can cover both.

The first and most logical unit to track with natural selection is not actually the individual, but the gene. You can't really track an individual across generations, because those are not just different instances but actually different systems. Then you're left wondering wtf it was you actually wanted to measure.

I think a more logical way to go about this is to first come up with tracking a gene adequately, and then applying to the collection of genes of an individual. This is closer to how the process works and conveniently destroys inaccurate preconceptions like that what matters is direct kinship distance rather than mean genetic distance (you can be less related to your kid than a random member of your ethnic group in some cases of racemixing)

If you want some bedrock constants, Campbell/Jung described archetypes would fit. Memes that do not change, only colored by context. As of the Indo-European conquest the heavenly memes are near universally patriarchal in nature, where variations of Dyēus are undisputed in leadership and law. Likewise the left hand is considered the less clean. Some form of law is not just accepted, but openly sought. The rod is a tool of justice and wisdom, whether a shephards crook or a royal scepter. A dome is a communal sacred space, whether a yurt or a forum.
My favorite, and one of the oldest, is hospitium/bread and salt. The ancient notion that one should be accommodating to guests. These and other symbols/concepts are deeper than cultural memes, bridging the divide between conscious and unconscious thought. Memes that tap into the base material will be like a tap root of a tree, lasting longer and whethering exterior change far better than more fleeting systems. Might explain the lasting power of 'nanny-states', the prolific spread of Hellenistic culture, and perhaps Chinese insularity. I've always suspected their racial difference in brain chemistry meant they had base memes that aren't present in other races, more drive for kinship and less xenophilia than the rest.

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.I do not claim this. I claim that STRUCTURED memes have additional protocol, on top of what already comes with the substrate. Consider things like hierachy, events, decision making proesses, etc. You can model that as a seperate layer included with the idea of the organization - the structure of how it is supposed to work.
I understand but disagree with this - while for a physical system this "infrastructure" layer exists, for a memetic system the only infrastructure is that of its host. The "how it's supposed to work" is itself a property of the meme, and can differ from host to host. Religion is actually an excellent example of this - if you look at how the various religions on earth (not just the abrahamic ones) function you'll find almost nothing that all religions have in common but do not have in common with other human-made memetic constructs. This does have value, though - for example, I consider leftism to be a religion that worships the twin "gods" of Progress and Equality, an idea utterly at odds with a the idea of "religion" as a construct but which works perfectly fine with my idea of "subsets of signals overloaded by memetic meaning". In this case my Religion meme, which holds the properties "holy symbols", "sin/penance" and "rituals" picks up leftism as a religion perfectly fine; meanwhile to a leftist it obviously isn't a religion, because those same symbols and behaviors don't qualify under the properties of their Religion meme.

I'm actually inclined to agree. The more I was typing the more I realized there is no real difference between the two - a "goalless" system just has the unstated goal of "survive" and is optimized for that. Unfortunately that means you have no choice but to account for the goal state in every self-perpetuating system, because it will directly affect how likely an instance of the system is to continue to exist (or reproduce, for propagating systems).

This isn't entirely accurate. While the single gene is indeed the basic unit of study, single gene expression is generally not a meaningful measurement on a pragmatic level. I don't know about you, but I don't particularly care about the continued survival of one particular gene, but rather the combination of genes that I perceive as individual instances of "human being". While there are certain properties of "human being" that I prioritize, those are typically not based on the expression of single genes, they are emergent properties from that instance's entire genetic code. You can't ignore the forest for the trees.

Other than that, I agree with the rest, but unless you want to dive into nascent gene editing technology you're going to have to deal with the fact that right now human gene propagation is only barely controllable.

This would definitely have a notable affect on any memetic information systems model. It seems that as a meme ages it becomes more authoritative, eventually becoming a component of the culture of its hosts. That would definitely have an affect on the transmission of memes that are either in accordance with, or in violation of, older and more powerful memes expressed by the host or its nation.

I'd love to see if there are studies out there to try to determine whether some of these ancestral memes actually have a genetic component. That would go a long way towards tying natural and memetic processes together.

Not really. The environment will optimize the function for you through selection, no internal analysis or reward function is needed. The environment CAN eventually select for the formation of a goal function, but it's not something that needs to be modelled for a system to make sense.

Consider a gene. It doesn't have any sort of internal feedback or analysis, it just codes a protein when the conditions are met. Where would you put a Q term in this case? It would only serve to confuse and obfuscate the issue. But when you get a human brain, even though its own substrate started out as a goal-less system, it has developed an internal reward function that seeks to maximize variables in the environment that are directly or indirectly linked with the fitness function Z. But it's not the same thing.
You are making a needless fundamental distinction between "physical" and "memetic" systems. Remember, we're dealing with abstractions all the way down. We are looking for some complex real world pattern that we want to boil down to a function that takes some parameters X, Z (and maybe Q) and spits out some Y. It doesn't really matter what happens "inside" the function, so long as the real thing and our model correlate to each other nicely.

By "structure" I mean the things we can boil down and seperate from the deeper and more universal system of human communication, which we abstract into the substrate system. Things like how many times you have to go to service, what you do, what are the procedures for recruiting a new individual into the religion, how it manages its funds, how it issues orders, etc. All of this can be neatly seperated from the substrate of human communication that facilitates the interaction between the memetic units that contain this information. I am not trying to DISMISS the more subtle stuff, or the outputs of other memes. I am trying to CONTROL for them, account for them in the part of the system we are not analyzing. This is crucial if you ever want to get any predictive work done. You don't account for time dilation or differential air resistance by altitude when aiming a tank gun. Stick to what is absolutely needed, do not introduce new complexity into your model unless it proves necessary to get the degree of prediction you want. If possible, account for everything you need as simply as possible.
Yes, but what are you than the extremely intricate system of genes in your genome and their expression through the biological substrate? Natural selection ultimately tracks sets and systems of genes, not the individual genomes. Your genome is just a permutation in a long series of genomes that carried your genes, and it forms just another step on the way to those of your distant descendants. This is exactly why I want to do this, to finally introduce some common patterns and rigour in our thinking about topics like this.

There is, it is called cybernetics. This whole thread is a discussion of cybernetics with apparently no one being aware of that.

pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html

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And just to provide the last page to chapter 1 for interested anons.

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Doesn't it though? Two organisms with a one-gene difference between the two will be selected based on the advantages or disadvantages of that one gene, so each is judged individually right?

Yeah, thanks. I'm sure there is not just this one, but probably dozens of similar structures or theories that have been created. I'm just not familiar with them and nobody has really tried to apply them on Zig Forums.

That's the thing about abstract academic models. Often some obscure sub-field of a sub-field comes up with something that could be used by somebody else, but there is no mutual awareness so the connection is made. That's the number 1 reason I actually posted this on Zig Forums as soon as I could halfway formulate it, in the hopes that somebody would recognize it as something that's already been done and we can use.

I don't wanna end up like those biology thots who thought they invented integrals.

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Whether or not an organism dies is decided at the substrate - organism - level. The gene gets to propagate depending on the success of the particular substrate system it is part of. I drew a bunch of pictures higher up but I guess they might not be perfectly clear.

Indeed. Cybernetics is very well established, though. For whatever reason, it does not get a lot of direct attention in academia, but it touches on most quantitative fields. To me, a combination of Cybernetics and Systems Theory (very similar to one another) should provide a robust theoretical basis to address the questions in your OP. I think this is a great thread, by the way. I am not being critical.

I love that your pic was published in 93-94. Hahaha.

Studying the Cybernetics text and pic related, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking has allowed me to meaningfully engage with professional engineers without any formal training on my own part.

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Now that I look at it, I've encountered bits and pieces of it before in my engineering education, just never directly and never called that, nor at a particularly deep level. In some roundabout way I probably just cobbled together shit I had already seen somewhere. The wonders of the human brain.
Well, if you have any criticisms you're welcome to bring them. This is not some art project, I'm trying to make a tool. If you are familiar with cybernetics already some input into this would be very welcome. See what could be changed and improved to achieve the stated goals - modelling complex systems ranging from genetics and memetics to groups and organizations in some reasonably robust way.

Took me long enough to remember why this concept felt familiar.
Psychohistory
Asimov made or codified to concept of mathematics applied to quantified social movements. A large enough population will tend to react in certain ways. Later books refined the concept as well as in universe refining led to predictions of types of persons who will move and shake, such as strong generals butting heads with strong emperors. Finally coming down to models that predicted individual actions and how to subvert them.
He was working with gauges and pressure valves, as opposed to our loose clumps of flora and fauna, but the concepts are analogous.

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Well, that's a SUBset of what we're trying to do here. Now that and has so kindly injected some actual expertise into this thread, I can describe as what we're doing as applying cybernetics to the issues that we usually discuss on Zig Forums

Aye. Somehow, without me being an engineer, I know shitloads of engineers and even some studying PhD in engineering. I will utilize some of the cybernetics concepts I've learned when talking to them and they'll say "Oh yes, I learned that concept but we didn't call it that." They also talk about their understanding being more fragmented. If you are engineer, I highly recommend you read through the cybernetics text I linked. Most of it may not be new, but the way the author ties it together may be beneficial to your thinking. I honestly do not understand why cybernetics is not a required course in any field dealing with systems and complexity.

I need to give the thread a solid read-through first. My knowledge of cybernetics is fairly pleb-tier. If you're an engineer, I am sure if you read the book you'll have a much better understanding than me. But, like you, I am interested in modeling complex behaviors. That interest in complexity is what got me down the road to studying systems and then cybernetics.

I have applied some cybernetics ideas to modeling organizations. Another useful theory, which is utilized in cybernetics, is Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication, which is largely credited with our modern information age.

If we want to model something, I say we choose something specific (which will eventually require us to model other systems it interacts with). That way we can focus our theoretical framework, refine it, then ascertain its generalizability. I am thoroughly interested in each subject you mentioned: genetics, memetics, organizations.

>Asimov
Transhumanism promoting kikes make me wary.

Yeah. Now that I am reading it, I feel like it's all the things I've been thinking about and putting together in the back of my head for the past 4-5 years as I've realized the common features in many political, historical, social, biological and physical processes but never really had the structure to put around them.
If you have indepentendly read a book about cybernetics you are likely more intelligent than 50-70% of engineers. Most of my peers are fairly narrow in their worldview and don't care about anything but the heuristics they have learned and keeping a job. Pic related.
We're on a similar track, looks like. Well, if you want to keep the thread going you can give your input. I'll probably take the time to read the books now.

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Ok ill bite. Your starting premise is utterly wrong in the first place. But I will not argue on that since such would assist our enemies. Instead I condemn you and your inquisition since you are trying to unlock and categorize how 'these' systems operate in an easily digested and broken down form so it can be deconstructed and then reworked in the favor of our elites and their system. It may not be your goal, but that is exactly what is going to go on here if the discussion takes off with 'us' rather than shills.

You; if successful; will do wonders for handing our enemies an workable model they can use to further destroy our people. As such you and your line of thought makes you an enemy of me and mine. If we have completed our tasks in crippling and then exterminating our enemies, THEN you are ok to peruse such avenues of thought, it would even be an noble goal. This line of thought is questioning exactly how we and our memes are most effectively functioning and how to compare such with existing known systems so it can be harvested and used. Since our enemies utterly fail at understanding memes, and how we are doing it, this line of questioning is attempting to ask those whom have mastered it thru trial and error how it has come about so they can end around our abilities and steal if for themselves.

If that is not your goal. Fuck off and redirect your abilities and thoughts into undermining and destroying our enemies. Anything else is treason against us and our volk. No excuses will be accepted when the time comes. Continue on and you directly work for our collective enemy. The time for kindness and understanding is past.

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If you think our enemies are not doing this as we speak, you are being naive. If you don't think they've had entire teams of analysts pouring through each and ever one of our successes, simulating, interacting, disrupting, stimulating and collecting data, you are deluded. If you pay attention to the thread, there is very little specific analysis of memes going on, and I'm not discussing anything that hasn't been discussed to death, just looking for ways to quantify and predict. If you think they are not implementing machine learning on massive datasets collected in real time to track, predict and subvert the spread of memes and movements on the internet, you're simply behind the times.

If you rely on something but don't know how it works, you are taking a leap of faith. If you want to know my opinion, I think the CIAniggers are much better at controlling the flow of memes and information on the internet than they were just a few years ago, while you still act like it's 2016 and meme magic will carry you through. (Which is in itself, funny, because that very notion was helped along massively by organized groups of analysts and shills).

Advocating for ignorance when everybody else is learning and adapting is suicidal stupidity. You can't expect to keep winning as a one trick pony. As it stands, it's very unlikely we have anything to worry about as far as theoretical knowledge is concerned, they have always had that edge. It's just that dealing with the spread of memes online is not a trivial task even if you have knowledge.

(heild)
Fortuna led me to these texts, I am glad that I can introduce them to you.
Agreed, user. The same track, right down to our desired application of this knowledge. I will gladly contribute to this thread what I can, but I need you too. It is unlikely too many others will be on this path. Read the books, but come back and discuss every couple or few chapters with me. I'll do some re-reading because I need it either way.

well, I can already say I like the fact that the brit paper establishes the analysis as taking place in discrete time steps rather than continuously. I didn't specify it too much but thus far I've been working with the implicit assumption that that is the case (see OP image, the world states), because it seemed much easier than trying to bother with continuous time steps.

I'll confess to being completely unread on cybernetics, but just from looking at the table of contents it would seem a lot of this has been incorporated into the standard CS undergrad curriculum. I'll have to read through to see if the science touches on it, but I'd have to wonder whether cybernetics touches on purely conceptual phenomena, or if it is limited to abstract models of physical phenomena. That's a big distinction once you start dealing with a rule set that isn't the laws of physics.

This is what I meant by there being an unstated goal of "survival" in the absence of some other goal. Without an intelligent actor to determine fitness the physical universe will do it instead, but there is still a determination of fitness made by the system's environment regardless.

You don't, because that's not the function that Q goes in. The gene's propagation process is completely disjoint from the fitness evaluation that determines whether that gene will be propagated. The fitness function is where Q goes.

The thing is, none of those things is specific to Religion. "Regularly scheduled visit" can also be applied to doctor's appointments; "Recruiting new members" can apply to your weekend DnD group; "Managing funds" and "Issuing Orders" can apply to your workplace. All of these things are recurring phenomena that do not exist to describe Religion-related communications; neither are any of them necessary for the existence of Religion. What you're describing are signaling patterns of a particular instance or subgroup of the Organized Religion memeplex, but there's no special "Religious Communications" interface that we have as humans, we just signal each other about religious matters through speech and symbols the same as with everything else.

I'm really glad this chart specified women or else I'd have been mortified by the average level of intelligence in our most rigorous professions.

Yes sir, discrete time steps allows us to perform algebraic functions. Also, we reduce the system down to individual states and go onto determine the possible state changes and such. Another paper that is useful for our analysis is
You can find that paper in PDF online freely. It talks about stochastic systems that enter into path dependencies, the author calls these non-ergodic systems. Ergodic systems being ones that can go from any state to any other state within the system's possible set of states.

Yes, you will find many cybernetics concepts in CS. If you read the pages I linked, he discusses real, material systems versus purely abstract ones. Ashby shows that cybernetics is applicable to ALL systems, whether abstract or material. It can even apply to systems that would never work in our physical universe.

And that's all exactly my point. There is no point in distinguishing between the fitness function and the reward function in a "passive" system. If such a term is needed, it can be introduced.
Yes, they are not. They don't need to be. I made that model as an example of the sort of thing you can do. You seperate the "religion" as a system into distinct types of subsystems - the people who form the following and fill the roles, the belief system in their heads, and the particular structure of that religion as it manifests in the real world. If you are interested in predicting, say, how quickly that religious organization could adapt to change, you could try to quantify things like:
And by then going out and getting some quantifiable data of some sort, if possible, you could form a predictive model of how quickly things like schisms or reforms can propagate, say, through the catholic church compared to the serbian orthodox church. It's an illustration of a concept at this point, but it's the general idea of the kind of thing you can do once you develop a model for a particular application using the basic tools provided.

Bear in mind, I am not trying to develop an absolute model set in stone, more like a set of guidelines for reasoning about certain systems in certain applications. You need to craft your model for extracting the relevant data yourself.
Feels familiar, right? But never been presented in quite that order with quite the same idea behind it.

Then we do what the masters of the past did. Code it, so the public is left scratching its head at the riddles.

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well gee thanks for the useful examples, ya anglo boomer fucks

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I'm honestly not sure what you mean by a reward function. Sometimes you'll have a penalty function or a reward function built into the heuristic that determines fitness, but they certainly wouldn't be considered separate concepts.

The argument is that the fitness function is independent of the propagation function, but it is exactly that fitness function that determines the rate of propagation and the rate of convergence towards the system's goal state. In fact, I'd argue that the properties of the propagation function are almost entirely irrelevant and the only thing that has any practical predictive value is analysis of the fitness function.

As to the religion argument, my only point was that you don't need a dedicated communications protocol for each meme or organization. What's actually happening is that each host has their own instance of the meme as you had modeled, and hosts broadcast their "version" of the meme through ordinary signaling behavior (which then propagates at a rate based on the new hosts' fitness heuristics).

Sounds interesting and extremely applicable. I would think that the plan going forward would be to analyze existing concepts from cybernetics and systems theory and then try to create a general predictive model for memetic constructs using the traits they share in common with other systems (the analogues between memetics and genetics being a good example).

Well, that's one way of modelling it. But then you have to account for the relative weights of mutations propagating from different members in different contexts etc
Well upon further reflection I think I figured out how to resolve the difference here without any fuzzy intuitive reasoning:
If a goal-driven system is a system that seeks to maximize some external set of variables "Q", a purely-self-pepetuating system is a special case of this system that seeks purely to maximize its own "fitness" function (if you can call it that) "Z". In systems that also have external objectives, there are members of Q that are not members ot Z. This means that for modelling systems that are only self-perpetuating there is no need to distinguish between Q and Z. This is what my hindbrain has been trying to express but for some reason I haven't been able to put into concise words.

The reward function I sometimes mention is a case of me tiredly skipping steps in thinking about things and conflating the internal functionality that drives the actor towards maximizing Q (reward function, like dopamine release un the brain) with the actual Q (the things that the dopamine release is driving the system towards).

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I know not where, but I was led to believe self reflection of this level was a topic amongst certain sects of Shintoism. They themselves tracing the evolution of descriptions of Chinese tigers into Japanese Oni or some other mythic creature.
If anyone knows what this half-remembered discussion was referring to, please link.

Exactly. Aren't heuristics fun?

I'm not sure you ever need to distinguish between Q and Z under these definitions. Both represent "goal conditions", it's just that Q is inherent to the immediate system whereas Z is inherited from its environment. I guess if you want to be pedantic the real goal space is the intersection of Z-goal with Q-goal, and Q-goal can be the universal configuration space for a system that doesn't have an immediate goal. Otherwise, yeah, there's no real need to distinguish between them.

Not necessarily. The goal space can be entirely seperate from the fitness function - consider the actions of something like a cruise missile or a kamikaze pilot, trying to accomplish something directly contradictory to self-perpetuation. The goal variables are in fact inversely correlated to the fitness function beyond a certain point.

The crutch here is that due to selection through removal, over time any family of systems will tend towards such that act to increase their own fitness function in some way. This is the natural selection that we observe.

You need to create methods to fast track the demise of their ideas. Their thoughts and emotions have shaky ground and their foundations are wafer thin. Start finding ways for them to burn resources on fruitless endevours like fighting shadows in the dark. When they talk about poor immigrant familes point them to abortion, when they talk about abortion talk to them about the aging population, when they talk about racism, talk to them about animal cruelty in third world countries, when they talk to you about capitalism talk to them about how jewish stereotypes oddly seem to match up with lawyers, bankers, doctors, and film executives, when they talk to you about sexism, talk to them about the suicide gender gap, when they talk to you about rape culture say that you agree: islam is a problem.

The cruise missile is not a self-perpetuating system, it cannot replicate or propagate itself and it does not maintain itself so it will eventually break down of its own accord. I don't think it's a good example of the kind of system you're trying to model.

The kamikaze pilot is a more interesting case, because in this case the pilot's personal goal comes in conflict with their natural prerogative of "survival". For the pilot, though, their own act of self-sacrifice is made only because they believe they are doing so for the sake of their family and nation. Essentially their desire to perpetuate the existence of their people outweighs their desire to perpetuate their own personal existence. Interestingly this is only sometimes the case, though - not everyone will be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their family, and even fewer for their nation. This introduces the idea that actors will place priority and weighting on various goal conditions, which can draw out differing behavior between actors when those goal conditions conflict with one another.

I think this model in progress can help with that end. If we can iron out a transmission model it's just a matter of choosing whichever memes and signaling methods have the highest throughput while minimizing the target's hysteresis. As mentioned, the hysteresis is lowered by using emotional rhetoric, and it seems that throughput is increased by memes that specifically target cognitive dissonance. We've just trying to figure out a formal vocabulary to talk about the same things we usually do here, so we can all be on the same page.