OK, so i should have been paying more attention to this group, given i'm the admin, apologies.

more like an absentee landlord who opened the doors and lost the keys down the drain?

my problem, you see, is my anxiety. i think of an idea, i prep a long and interesting post, and then bail at the last minute due to impostor sydrome. or rather the realisation that it's only impostor syndrom if you're actually good at something, otherwise it's just a relisation that you're shit at something.

a while back (a good while now) i was a member of a simulationist group; you know, where we're living in a matrix style simulation? i saw a post saying that there was a banned subject, that had been the cause of a previous iteration of the group's demise. the idea being that once you agree or accept that you're in a simulation, you ask how to get out. once you ask how to get out, suicide appears to be an inevitable escape mechanism, or rather an acceptance that there's no real free will etc.

now, at 5:30 this morning, trying to breath around a cat that was crushing my chest, i wondered, is there a point where you can take a subject to its logical end-point, and you have to bin it all?

this is already starting to feel like a round-the-houses type explanation when i go off on tangents, apologies.

i was thinking of an analogy for a meme connecting to a person's own meme-plex. 1st off, i think there needs to be a name for a person's own personal iedology that's a cooler word than ideology, and not meme-plex, as i think that's better suited to groups of complimentary memes.

i digress.

i remember a science journal years ago, and i think lots of virus diagrams whos your virus, with like a plug on it, and then cell with the appropriate socket on it. i think most of the time its like protein connections and that sort of jazz. my brain came up with a sort of amorphous blob representing my own meme-brain, and along comes a meme, with a plug on it, prongs of some sort, and then the amorphous blob extends a tentacle or feeler, with some sort of similar opposite socket, waving around looking for a connection. if there's a match; Hey! and the meme connects to the mem-brain, and i go and buy a soy raspberry frozen latte. if there's not a match, the new meme bows its head (if it has one) and sadly wanders off to try some other mug.

but then i started thinking macro and micro.

at what point do you have to make the distinction between the meme and the body, or some sort of primal circuitry that drives what we do? the "bloort!" bit i guess Doug Stanhope might say.

i think we can probably agree that a mem-plex is a macro way of looking at memes; complimentary memes acting or organising for the benefit of the whole; religion, politics, that sort of thing.

at what point can you look at something and not analyse it based on the memes involved? I look out the window at my car. I picked the colour because it's loud, edgy. the COLOUR of the CAR. the COLOUR of the CAR. the brand of the car, the fact it's a hybrid. memes in my head drove all of those.

either; 1. everything is memes. everything. and everything else is just a subset.

or 2. memes are indeed a dead field, being as they are, some sort of meta-descriptor of things that have their own field

possibly 3. they are a way of meta-discussing small areas of reality that allows us to diseemble some problems and look at them in a different way.

i envisage a metronome swinging between 1 & 2, with 3 flickering in and out of existence in the middle

see, 1 & 2 represent our own Roko's Basilisk. for those who don't know, this is an AI theory where an AI would create a duplicate of you to torture because you didn't help it come into existence. that's probably vague and i've missed a detail, but it's known as a "banned subject" in a lot of Ai circles. you don't talk about Roko's Basilisk.

so, similarly to Simulationism and AI, do options 1 and 2 represent memetics spiralling up its own arsehole and becoming irrelevant. do you stare out of the window and just think what's the point, give up and go and find some other way of occupying your time until you die?

when i "inherited" this group (read claimed it as the admins had abandoned it) the old admin heresybob said "dead subreddit for years ever since scientific community went in another direction". is this true? does this represent option 2?

i'm not saying bin the group or that i'm abandoning it, but i guess i'm thinking "food for thought" over what memetics is, and where or if you have to draw a line somewhere.