Memetic Autocatalysis

From what we know about the evolutionary lineage of the mind, it seems likely that what we now call 'memes' (or simply ideas) go back millions of years. Being generous to birds, our common origin is 310 million years ago-- that might be the root of the tree of knowledge.

NB: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08652-5 systematic bone tool manufacture at 1.5 MYA.

I suspect that historically ideas arose primarily with reference to the external world. See a bone, make a tool. See a tiger, make a particular sound. (The programmed calls of birds would then not be 'ideas' in the same sense. Remember I was being generous including birds at all-- but they do have complex behaviour.)

I wonder if this remained the primary means of eliciting ideas until very recently. That a potter was someone who surrounded themselves with pots, making the production of more and different pots as natural as banging a drum in a drum circle, or adding another figure to an already populated cave wall. I wonder if ideas might have evolved for a very long time in this more reactive mode.

And I wonder if the spontaneous generation of strings of ideas-- what we might call 'thinking'-- was a relatively recent innovation. Jaynes argues in The Origin of Consciousness that Greek culture was nonreflective, was simply reactive in exactly this way. Another piece of evidence might be the Upanishads and things like the Diamond Sutra which seem to contain instructions for producing spontaneous thought, tools for reflection and ideation. Perhaps those artifacts were created during the transition period, perhaps they were the tools by which early humans started bootstrapping modern consciousness.

With memetic autocatalysis-- the ability of ideas to generate other ideas without reference to the external world-- its clear how mathematics and abstract philosophy come about. And naturally a lot of trash, as thoughts should or must fundamentally relate to the material world. Where it really gets valuable is where a long wander in idea space can take us over some rough ground but bring us back to a new basin of stability, where ideas make sense again and can be put to work. Im reminded of how my Stat Mech teacher used to talk about Fourier Space, where he would go to navigate around something impossible in more everyday mathematics. By taking a jaunt into a dimension with different rules we can return with new 'knowledge', where 'knowledge' must strictly be knowledge about the world.

Presumably this statement isn't novel and I'm just ignorant of the appropriate branches of philosophy. Then again, this does seem to be something even our brightest are still confused by. Maybe Hofstadter (or Descartes) went too far-- it is not that I am a strange loop, but that memetic autocatalysis is the main process by which I generate strings like Cogito Ergo Sum. I am also still simultaneously a simple animal that sees and does.

One aspect you are missing is the social one. Ideas, memes, and humans did not evolve independently. A lot of it had to do with cooperation. Most of our ideas are higher-order intuitions about our own intuitions, used to justify or explain our behavior to others. “Why did you strike rock against rock?” — caveman has no idea, mind is opaque, yet some form of rationalization arises and ideas spread. The “caveman with no idea” must generate post hoc rationalizations to coordinate with peers, distribute labor, plan hunts. Theory of mind must account for the cultural factor : “why did you do that?” demands an answer even if none was available at the time. Over time, this social pressure refines the ability to generate justifications proactively, giving rise to planning and abstraction.

>>3721
Good point, I didn't need to narrow it to a single mind. Memetic autocatalysis as a phrase applies just as well to groups of people. And of course that's exactly what the Homeric (and Upanishadic) traditions looked like, as far as we know.

And as you say, over time these reactive rationalizations provide training and refinement to individuals, who eventually get so practiced at it they internalize it.

Tbh reacting to a built environment that is littered with artifacts is already a form of memetic autocatalysis. But when we managed to internalize the process it really picked up steam.

>>3720

OP claims people did things as environmental response. See tiger, make sound. Agree: birds do this. OP then extends argument to tool-making: see pots, create more pots. (I disagree of bone -> tool, that requires thinking)

When children start out, they don't think. They just do. Taking the bite from the apple of knowledge, Upanishads, abstract thinking explained by someone, or even encountering the right blog post: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/

...makes you different. You come up with your own way of seeing things: mimetic autocatalysis. You're already on this path, might as well give you a push.

Each person in their own time seems to come up with their own way of seeing the world and describing it. Yours may differ based on your experiences, the words you're more familiar with, and the works of writing you choose to integrate into your system.

>>3721

Forget where I read this, but if you asked a speaking cat for what reasons it licked its palms, the real reason is "it wanted to and felt compelled to" but its speech would come up with scientific and plausible sounding reasons.