So I was suggested a story and in this story was introduced what I thought was your typical garden-variety memetic hazard. Turns out this supposedly memetic hazard causes a physical manifestation of a distinctly biological nature(presumably somewhat supernatural). So that got me thinking.

Assuming we have a working memetic virus that can cause some rewiring, neurotransmitter imbalances, controlled brainwave states/seizures, etc. is there a pathway from the the senses all the way down to the genetic level? My thinking here is that the meme hijacks the nervous system which can cause epigenetic changes. Now usually epigenetics concerns regulating the genes that you already have so here I'm gunna borrow an idea from computer security, the Weird Machine. Now obviously the human body isn't a computer, but what if our meme set up an epigenetic Weird Machine that allowed Arbitrary Protein Synthesis(as an analog to arbitrary code execution)? It slowly but surely builds up the capacity to build more and more proteins until it has enough to do something useful.

Idk how or if an APS exploit is physically possible and I don't really know enough about epigentics to guess(i tried looking a bit, but whoo boi am i outta my depth). Bio is not my strong suite. Still, just imagine an AGI being able to cook up a bioweapon in the bodies of the researchers studying it. Jezzus, imagine an auditory memetic bioweapon. A scream that makes your body start producing infections pathogens. What about over a longer period of time? A meme that both epigenetically and through artificial selection by the infected slowly modifies the target population to be more maliable. Remote genemodding? Lots of story ideas even if it's probably🤞 not possible.

Edit: Went a little overboard with the jargon here. When I say "memetic hazard" i mean like a mind virus being distributed through the senses. Like you hear a music or see a video and that's the vector. The memetic virus rewires ur brain a bit. Adversarial Examples from the machine learning field might also be relevant. Neural networks may be susceptible to maliciously structured inputs designed to cause them to misclassify. A more human version of that might be optical illusions.

Also I feel like I should explain that weird machine thing a bit more. The idea is that with so much redundancy and interdependance we could find chains of neuron-level and eventually epigenetic-level events that get the right proteins, folded the right way in the right places to start having unintended side-effects that add up to a working assembler. Even if the system wasn't designed to make proteins it's poorly defined enough that we may be able to get something working with only a single or very few epigenetic-level "instructions". A nice real-world example is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86] instruction set that most desktop computers are running on. The most basic instructions the computer can perform are so convoluted that even if you could only use a single one of them you would still have a working programming language that can do anything you could do with the whole set(see here).

So maybe we have to fiddle around with the neurocircuitry a lot just to get that one epigenetic-level instruction and the next level is even moreso. Would probably take an impractical amount of time to carry out. Especially with all the noise of an active working brain. Don't sleep, maybe when ur mental activity goes down it gets stronger😬

I guess this kinda presupposes the use of tons of machine learning and maybe even a general superintelligence. Honestly even if we assume all the other dubious steps in this hypothetical scifi chain are working fine doing this sort of thing probably requires an insane amount of compute. All probably a real-time sort of thing cuz there's probably no way ur brain can support that.

PS: please don't take this post too seriously. I know how much handwaving is happening here. I just thought it sounded like a really cool story idea