Memetics: The Sovereign Meme

As mentioned in my last post, memes are any piece of information: beliefs, knowledge, skills, and so on.

To make a better definition, consider your brain to be a computational device, taking input from all of your senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, balance, temperature, etc), and outputting signals that correspond to certain behaviors. The software inside is your mind, and equivalently to a computer, it runs algorithms.

Memes are such algorithms. Learning how to drive a car (a memetic skill) is an algorithm. And so is playing tennis, walking, climbing, kissing, and yes, fucking. All skills are obviously algorithms. They are stored in your memory, and executed when needed. You know how to drive even when you're not doing it, because the software is there, only dormant (not currently running).

It may be hard to see how beliefs are algorithms, but it is only because you haven't thought about what it is that the execution of a belief does: beliefs create emotions when triggered (executed). There are 3 interesting sets of beliefs: factual, opinions, and goals. I will only address factual beliefs in this article and leave the rest for the next posts.

Factual beliefs are truth-propositions: beliefs that state something about yourself or the external world. Here are some examples: "I am beautiful", "I am charismatic", "I am smart", "girls like sex as much as guys", "boys have penises and girls vaginas". I will call such beliefs factual beliefs because they make statements about the truth of something, according to a (sometimes implied) set of premises.

These beliefs trigger emotions in the relevant contexts: if you believe yourself to be attractive, you may experience less AA approaching a hottie. Of course, beliefs interact with each other in memeplexes: if you believe yourself to be attractive, but also believe yourself to be too attractive to be rejected by girls, you will instead have shitloads of AA. The closer the distance between two memes, the easier it is for them to be executed concurrently, which gives rise to the complexity of our sometimes very mixed emotions. If we have two inconsistent beliefs, that is, two beliefs that contradict each other, and they are close to each other, they may trigger at the same time. When you want to go for the kiss but hesitate, and become confused, chances are it's because your memes are pulling you in two opposite directions.

We feel more certain about some beliefs than others. Certainty is a continuous measure; we can talk about degrees of certainty. When we are very certain of a factual belief, we call it knowledge. Note however, than certainty has nothing to do with external truth. Your memes don't give a shit whether they are true or not in any absolute sense.

I will here give my proof of memes' indifference to absolute truth. We don't need to assume that any particular meme must be true or false, only note that some memes are inconsistent, for example the belief in reincarnation and heaven/hell (because your soul cannot simultaneously be reborn in this world and end up in heaven or hell). This means both of them cannot be true at the same time. Then, at least one is false. But we already know that both these beliefs are among the most well propagated, and hence many people believe in things that cannot be true. The proof doesn't tell you which memes are true and false, but it certainly proves that memes don't have to be true to propagate. Since many people reject the notion of reincarnation, and either reincarnation is true or it isn't, many people also have to believe in memes that are true. Hence truth value has nothing to do with how certain people are of their memes. Don't confuse certainty with truth.

In fact, memes are not only indifferent to truth, they can also be indifferent to you: memes simply propagate for the sake or propagating, and when they deliver a content that is likely to be remembered and spread, they are better at surviving and replicating. Some memes propagate fast but ultimately lead us to commit suicide (called memeoids). What you should care about is whether memes increase your well being or not. In terms of fitness, every meme has its own fitness value, as well as the a fitness it brings you. It is the latter you should care about, and not the former.

There are a lot of people who believe in reincarnation that are happy, and the same is true for believers of heaven and hell. Being two inconsistent beliefs, this means that truth is not what makes people happy. Instead, it is our conviction, our certainty. But certainty over our beliefs are not sufficient to make us happy.

I am certain that earth has a spherical shape, as opposed to a flat one. But this belief doesn't make me happier, and chances are you care even less. What is required is that the belief has personal value: it must mean something to me. Being the self centered species we are, any belief we have about ourselves, whether good or bad, true or false, has personal value. And the more certain you are about it, the more you amplify its effects. The belief "I can't get hot girls" is bad (has negative fitness for you), and the more certain you are about it, the worse it gets.

However, wanting to be certain is not the same as being certain.

You have limited control in triggering your beliefs. You can consciously expose yourself to a situation in which certain memes would trigger: e.g. looking at old photos of you and your girlfriend will bring back pleasant memories, hence triggering the belief that you are meant to be together.

But you can't simply say "There's an abundance of girls here" and expect your AA to disappear instantly. It's not enough to know it logically; you must feel it. Otherwise the meme is unable to trigger. It's remains a dormant fact, because you lack certainty of it. Indeed, certainty is an emotional and not logical property. Religion and politics are fragile topics to discuss with strangers, precisely for this reason: it can trigger emotions if the person has strong beliefs, that is, certainty in them.

To avoid confusion, this is indeed circular: beliefs with no emotional attachment cannot be triggered. If they can't be triggered, they can't release the feelings that you will want.

The feeling triggered by the meme depends on the content of the meme, and in which context it is triggered. For example, the abundance mentality meme can trigger when you are going to approach, because you suddenly experience (not think!) "holy shit, there's fuckloads of girls here! There's one!" and out the brain goes AA. If a girl is rude to you, the meme may trigger "yeah whatever, there's another girl!" and without thinking twice, you leave the girl you are talking to and open the next. If your LTR is breaking up with you, the abundance meme could trigger a feeling "oh too bad, but it's going to be alpha to be single again!".

This is the power of beliefs: when triggered, they release an emotional response that changes the way you feel, i.e. your state, and accordingly, your behavior. Ultimately, memes have the power to make us both feel and behave alpha. They have the power to make us alpha.

This is what (factual) beliefs can do. But how do you attach the necessary emotional certainty to good beliefs? As I and Odin have argued for ages, the most efficient way to do this is through affirmations. Logic alone cannot create emotions. So how do affirmations relate to memes?

You have a set of innate instructions, some of which are instincts, others desires. You were born with them, and there is nothing you can do to remove them. You may try to suppress or fight them, and you will be emotionally punished for doing so, and simply repeating the painful process will not change much. Your genes cannot change during your lifetime, but can you recalibrate the triggers the innate mechanisms you are bound by? The answer is yes, but there are ways that work, there are ways that don't work, and then there are ways that make things worse.

To stick to what works, there is conditioning, in which we learn to associate two events that may or may not be correlated. Why do you throw the dice with such strength when you hope for high numbers, and so carefully when you hope for low numbers? Why do you wear lucky shirts or necklaces? Because of conditioning: your mind is made to second guess correlations in a highly unscientific manner, and this is because the scientific method is simply not what made people stay alive, evolutionarily speaking.

If you have little experience with girls in clubs, rejection may condition you negatively. Depending on your other memes, you may be conditioned to avoid a particular type of girls, the place where you were rejected, or at worst, girls all in all. Memes such as the abundance mentality are powerful because they override this mechanism, but only once they are installed into your mind. What we may need first, is the positive side of conditioning: to get results, which reward our minds, makes us feel more alpha, and as we do start getting something that looks like an abundancy of girls, well, we might actually feel an abundancy of girls too. Good looking people tend to become naturals, because they get such positive treatment from girls throughout their adolescence. The naturals that don't look good, as you may have noticed, are simply not affected by rejection (because if they were, they would never have become natural to begin with).

This, in fact, is the psychological mechanism called confidence: it inputs your current social status, creates emotions that output calibrated behavior for that status. The more success you have, the more confidence you get, the more likely you are to succeed. This is one of the scientific results from Barkow, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist.

So the idea is simple: install the memes you want, condition yourself by attaching emotions to them, and enjoy your new powers!

However, there is one objection I have to the "install" part here. When it comes to your memetic core, you want to be careful about which memes you install. Development is good, which why we constantly extend our meme map with new memes. But the core is, as the name implies, something that shouldn't be hacked beyond death.

We can categorize factual beliefs in the following way: beliefs have a valence (positive or negative), and they have a degree of certainty attached to them. These two dimensions give four different types of beliefs:

	False	True
Negative	Limiting belief	Sticking point
Positive	Mental masturbation	Positive confirmation

Negative beliefs that aren't true limit you by virtue of believing them. If they were true, the limiting factor is not the belief itself but the competency, and it becomes a sticking point. You avoid limiting beliefs by never assuming something is impossible in the first place: experiment, and consider it a sticking point if it doesn't work. But be practical about it. If you're ugly beyond repair, then why bother focusing on it? Don't make it a part of your core, push it out to an extended set of memes. If you're uncharming, then fix it. It takes 2-4 weeks to fix a sticking point: plant the right memes, find the memes you already have that may need more attention (focus/certainty), give them stimuli (conditioning), and spark them to life! Spark them to life, awaken your dormant alpha gene, feel the energy, yes the strength within you! Become one with the light, embrace it my child! As you are in the process of developing a lot, it's ok to have core sticking points. But as you grow older and presumably stronger, girls expect you to have your shit together.

The standard tools of this community are well enough to fix core sticking points, as well as help you identity core limiting beliefs (gay beliefs such as "I'm too ugly to attract girls"). The only sticking points we should allow to remain are not those of beliefs but of skills: you may be lacking a certain skill for a particular situation (and hence it's not part of your core). For example, if you suck at kissing or fucking and lose girls because of that, it's clearly gay and needs to be fixed.

Some things don't work well, which means it becomes a "negative confirmation". For example, you may come to realize that, it's actually quite hard to close 9s in the bathroom after 10 minutes consistently. If you started with the belief that it was possible, that was "mental masturbation", and when you realized it's not possible, it became a negative confirmation (tagged "not usually possible"). Some people equate such beliefs with limiting beliefs, when in fact, they are the complete opposite (their negation are positive confirmations): knowing what is impossible is good. It gives you the opportunity to focus on what can be changed, and avoid working on what never will. Get used to it! It's called reality, and you are not strong enough until you can face up to reality and deal with it, rather than being in your own world of denial.

Positive beliefs make you feel better, but some are mental masturbation because they are only meaningful in your own head. That's fine as long as you don't want to improve, but obviously, you can't fix what you don't realize is broken. Through negative affirmations, one may realize what's mental masturbation and not. All you have to do is realize that there is a world out there too, not just inside you head. Keep an open eye and you'll see.

Positive confirmations is knowing what one can do, because one has done it and gotten positive affirmations. It's the holy grail of beliefs: confidence strengthening beliefs that one knows are real. This is where every core belief you have will end up one day, or is it already done?

In my next post, I will address the other classes of beliefs: opinions and goals. After that, I will give you very concrete examples of just how powerful memes can be by giving you my memetic core.

Any comments welcome.