People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.

1. Foundations of Memetics

A meme is any information that can be copied by others in some way.
The definition extends beyond the colloquial use to include any form of information with the potential for replication. This encompasses not only internet memes but any piece of information that can be shared or reproduced, raising questions about the nature of information transmission and the various mediums through which it occurs.
Patterns of information that can indirectly influence their surroundings.
Memes are characterized by patterns that, beyond mere replication, exert an influence on their environment.
This includes any text, thought, habit, action, or symbol that can be understood or copied.
By broadening the scope, memes can manifest as textual elements, thoughts, habits, actions, and symbols across various domains of human expression.
Examples of memes:
ideas, stories, ideologies, jokes, narratives, brands, identities, habits, practices.
These examples illustrate the diverse categories of information that can be transmitted and replicated, influencing culture in myriad ways.
Memes exist inside hosts, like you and me.
You and me are hosts, whether you like it or not.
This underscores the inescapable influence of memes on our cognition and behavior.
Memes have direct power over hosts, and power over the natural world through us.
Their influence extends not only to shaping individual thoughts and actions but also to impacting the external environment.
The Mind is where these memes reside (in the abstract sense).
The Mind is an emergent effect of neurons firing together.
Just like how a nation or community is an emergent effect of a group of people.
You can view memes like “apps” in the brain’s “software”, if you wish.
The Mind is a powerful survival tool; it was a useful servant in the past.
The Mind is now our master, we do not control the Mind, it controls us.
This means that our cognitive processes and the memes they harbor shape our behavior—often beyond our conscious control.
You are not your Mind, you are the thing that is thinking.
In modern society, the human organism is subservient to the Mind.
These distributed pieces of information directly impact how we behave.
You can view memes as parasitic, symbiotic, or benign, depending on the effect on the hosts.
- Parasitic: Memes that benefit at the expense of the host.
- Symbiotic: Memes that mutually benefit both the host and themselves.
- Benign: Memes that exist neutrally without significantly impacting the host.
Similar to genes, memes are also self-replicating patterns of information.
Consider them like “memory genes”, but not made of DNA—just arrangements of neurons.
The same principles of natural selection and evolution apply for memes.
The strong memes survive and replicate, and some memes do so at the expense of their hosts.
The replication is done with the help of the hosts that carry that information.
Your body is one huge advertisement billboard for your genes.
What you do and say is one huge advertisement billboard for your memes.
- Advertisement for Memes: Our actions and words promote and disseminate the memes we harbor.
The interactions of all memes in a society is its culture.
Memes can be dormant:
They might exist in a book, on a little-visited website, or on a T-shirt that no one sees or wears.
Memes are active when they are being repeated or copied in some way.
By simply mentioning to you: penguins, dental floss, Madagascar,
the concepts these words refer to in your mind are activated.
Similar to how genes express a trait (like blue eye color), memes express an abstract concept in a mind (like ‘penguin’).
This text has the power to briefly revive something that was previously dormant in you, sometimes before you have time to react and without your permission.
This is why our attention is highly sought after, and often abused.
Hereditary traits are implemented through strands of DNA in living organisms. Concepts are implemented through clusters of neurons in living brains.
For ideas and memes to spread, they must be expressed. If not, they die out.
A social media page that is getting 10,000 accesses a day is an active meme.
Computers can act as hosts too—in the internet age, even the device in front of you.
An advertisement billboard can be a host, too. An internet ad as well.
The host doesn’t need to be alive; it just needs to be active in spreading information.
Memes are selfish.
They can damage the hosts if that means higher chances of replication. Many memes do not benefit their host but benefit someone or something else.
(See: smoking, drinking, marketing, social media, politics, religion, terrorism, gambling.)
Some memes are useful, most memes are useless, and others are damaging or even self-damaging.
You can refer to a damaging meme as a toxic meme.
Examples of toxic memes: Scientology, Anti-Vax Movement, toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, many political or religious ideologies, marketing campaigns that focus solely on profit.
Religions, at their heart, are the most basic form of memetic replicator –
“Believe this statement and repeat it to everyone you hear, or else you will be eternally tortured.”
Memes are not spread based on their usefulness to us or on Truth. They are spread based on their ability to spread.
Memes replicate through something we can describe as an “infectious” mechanism.
We have been infected by memes—and continue to be every waking day.
A brain exposed to an idea that successfully gets encoded in it has been infected by that idea.
That brain will exhibit different behavior, and through the host’s actions, the meme will spread further.
It’s a constant battle for ideas, and brains are the battlegrounds where these are fought.

“Like a computer virus residing inside a laptop’s inner circuitry.”
Once an individual host has been infected, it will end up spreading it to others.
Memes face a struggle for existence. If they don’t repeat themselves, they die out.

The current memes that are alive are sticky, and they have resisted death many times. Hence, they will likely resist death in the future as well.

2. The Nature of Mind, Identity, and Self

Memes evolved to be selfish and self-preserving.
This evolution explains why many minds resist exposure to opposing ideas.
It is just an evolved mechanism of the memes themselves.
If they didn’t behave that way, many past memes would have died out. Only the selfish memes have remained.
We have core memes that are driving us.
We call these core memes our beliefs and identities.
When you believe something, you are basically giving it permission to influence your life.
Picture your mind as a lively carnival of beliefs and identities—your beliefs conduct the symphony of your life.
Many beliefs are unexamined and run wild inside our minds like weeds in a garden.
Identities are memes that encode a self-image about the host and how it should behave.
Based on our self-images, our behavior gets shaped along with our perception of self.
The ego is the meme that speaks when we start a sentence with “I,” “me,” or “my.”
That is not you speaking. It’s a meme speaking.
That is not you—it is just an idea of who you are: a self-image.
You, in fact, do not exist apart from an abstract sense.
- Abstract Existence: Your existence is conceptual rather than entirely tangible.
- Lack of Independent Existence: There is no standalone “you” outside of this abstraction.
There are organs, skin, bones, a mouth that speaks—but there is no singular “you.”
You are an emergent property of the forces that constitute you.
Many forces contribute to what you are (environmental, genetic, memetic, cybernetic, etc.).
Just observe a human scrunched over on their phone.
That phone has a direct influence on that human, through the changes in their Mind.
The control of your actions is driven by the expression of both memes and genes—nature and nurture intertwined in endless complexity.
You are the interaction of all these forces; separate, they do not produce you.
If you think you are in control, it’s just another meme being expressed and spread.
An identity meme takes ownership of you by speaking in the first person.

3. Memetic Dynamics and the Path of Least Resistance

Memetic information follows the path of least resistance.
This tendency can be explained by several principles:
- Nature Seeks Equilibrium: Physical systems tend toward lower energy states.
- Entropy and Disorder: Systems evolve toward higher entropy.
- Efficiency and Conservation of Energy: Systems minimize energy gradients to stabilize.
- Physical Laws: Objects move in ways that reduce energy expenditure.
- Biological Evolution: Traits that optimize energy usage are favored.
- Economic Systems: Social structures optimize resources to minimize costs.
Lazy memes have an edge over hard-to-digest memes, because the time to replicate (fecundation time) is critical.
This meme is long, and it’s taking time to read.
But despite that, you are reading it because you understand the importance of this idea.
You may revisit this in the future as more observations lead you to this Truth:
That we, the humans, are slaves to our ideas (and to the systems and algorithms that spread them).
You don’t have to be aware of memes for them to spread—they simply do, often unconsciously.
Memes can also be replicated inside your thoughts. No need to speak or write to anyone.
The brain is a battlefield of ideas.
Just by thinking about what is inside you, some patterns of information get stronger over others.

4. Creativity and Meta-Memetics

Creativity is an evolutionary process inside the brain.
Creativity is also the mechanism brains use to decode memes from observed behavior or symbols.
Human memes are rarely copied via imitation; they are mostly reconstructed from meaning.
The concepts discussed here are still memes—you may call them meta-memetics (memes that spread awareness about the existence of memes).
Your brain is infected by this now, and you will think about it in the future. Or not.
It all depends on you, if this resonates with you or not.
The soil and conditions dictate if a particular seed (meme) will grow.
There are memetic effects to any piece of language or sensory information that interacts with you.
If you wish to understand these effects, you must first be aware of their existence. Look around and you will see them at play.
Beautiful complexity: The ant colony is the living being, and ants are just parts of its body.
Similarly, ideas are the active elements—and we are parts of the idea “colony.”
A single idea can exist in multiple bodies.
Functionally, it is the same message or abstraction distributed among many minds.
Awareness of memes can be useful—it creates a kind of memetic immunity.
(It’s harder to fall for a trick once you understand how it works.)

5. Memes as Replicators in Comparison to Genes

Anything that can create more copies of itself is a replicator—this applies to any pattern.
This includes viruses, animals, genes, computer viruses, automated spam bots, crystals, bacteria, and parasites.
Genes are replicators based on molecular bonds, copied within living cells.
Memes are replicators based on abstractions, copied by our minds and brains.
Software describes the patterns of change in information within a physical substrate.
Memetics describes the patterns of change in information inside human brains and within human culture (collectives of brains).
It’s a decentralized system of information replication and distribution that evolved in society.
Through it, human civilization has reached its current state.
Memes have a high rate of copying but lower stickiness and fidelity compared to genes.
Humans co-evolved with memes; this is why our brains are so large compared to other animals
(brain is ~5% of body mass but uses ~20% of body energy).
Big brains were useful for memes, and some memes were useful for survival—hence our big-brained ancestors were advantaged and procreated at a higher rate.

6. Transmission and Spread of Memes

Genes have vertical transmission (from parent to child, hereditary).
Memes can have horizontal transmission and multiple “parenting.”
This makes memes much faster and easier to spread, as they can travel through many avenues.
The natural world is currently being overrun by our human culture.
The stories and abstractions we created enabled us to become the apex predators of nature.
For domains that follow memetics closely, consider:
marketing, politics, advertising, corporations, religions, fashions, language, songs, theories, jokes, common sense (norms), traditions.
Memes are incredibly difficult to pinpoint, analyze, or delimit.
They constantly morph; after a few iterations they appear original, but they stem from pre-existing information processes that defy simple breakdown.
You cannot figure out how an entire crowd behaves by studying one human.
You cannot figure out how a mind works by studying one group of neurons.
Similarly, you cannot deduce how an idea spreads by examining a single human mind.
Most of what we have, we owe to other sources.

7. Memetics in the Animal World and Human Culture

There are no authors, only contributors and their incremental changes.
Animals (non-human) also exhibit memetic behaviors, though more rudimentary.
Animals usually have the hardware to at best imitate actions (see apes, birds).
Animals other than humans do not have the circuitry to reproduce meaning.
Homo sapiens can reproduce meaning through creativity and imagination.
In the animal world, memes include: sounds, birdsong, and techniques for hunting and survival.
Chimpanzee brains have basically the same building blocks as Homo sapiens brains, with the primary difference being that humans have roughly 3× the number of neurons.
- Neuronal Similarities: Both species share many structural and functional similarities.
- Differences in Brain Size: While brain size is larger in humans, it’s the organization and connectivity that contribute to advanced cognition.
- Cognitive Differences: Humans exhibit higher-order thinking, language, and complex problem-solving.
- Cultural Complexity: Humans have developed intricate social structures and cultural practices beyond what is observed in chimpanzees.
Humans are great hosts for memes.
We developed language and culture to scale our communication, transmission, and idea-processing abilities.
By doing so, we inadvertently gave “life” to our ideas.
Humans are the only animals that can collaborate and share information in large numbers (like ants) and with high quality (like apes).
Note: Other animals also exhibit social cooperation, but human collaboration is uniquely complex.
The most powerful tool that generates our human culture is our use of common stories.
These narratives drive our behavior and actions.

8. Digital Memetics and the Internet Age

The internet has vastly boosted the strength and reach of memes.
The number of connections has grown exponentially.
The vectors of transmission have multiplied.
For memes, failure means extinction; success means replication.
The winning scenario is an infinite game—it continues until the meme dies.
It’s all similar to the nature of life.
Life attempts to survive endlessly by its very construction.
For example, the Hayflick limit describes how normal cells eventually cease to divide, yet stem cells do not follow this limit.
Memes and genes are two distinct systems of life that co-compete.
One is slower and more precise—nature versus nurture.
Both systems interacted in our development as modern humans.

9. Artificial Replicators and the Emergence of “Temes”

Now, you can view a third player entering the scene: artificial software.
This replicator lives inside the “brains” of computer systems and follows similar mechanics.
You can call this third replicator a teme (terminology by Susan Blackmore).
The emergence of a new replicator is dangerous—it signals a new evolutionary process. Humans, having released memes into the world, now face temes as a third replicator alongside genes and memes.
Rational memes are those that focus on the creation of new memes (David Deutsch).
Anti-rational memes, by contrast, focus on preserving the meme itself.
You may view skepticism as being driven by rational memes, as opposed to irrational ones.
Our human impulses and emotions are the first to latch onto memes.
Our amygdala—and similar brain regions responsible for emotion—are highly sensitive.
These regions rapidly detect emotionally charged stimuli, shaping our responses and memetic transmission.
Memes discovered this fact; hence, what spreads is emotionally loaded (e.g., anger, lust, curiosity).
At its base, each human is an organism that seeks pleasure and flees from pain.
You can model each meme as having a fitness—the higher the fitness, the better the meme is suited for replication.
For a particular meme “m”:
F(m) = R(m) × A(m) × T(m) × E(m)
where:
- F is overall fitness
- R is retention (ease of persistence in a host)
- A is assimilation (ease of encoding in a host)
- T is transmission (ease of being carried through available vectors)
- E is expression (ease of communication and propagation)
These criteria are not exhaustive but serve as a starting point. You may devise your own and test them.

10. Final Reflections and Alternatives

Do not believe anything I say here.
You have your own life experience to guide you.

There are two alternatives:

A – Either our Mind becomes our servant, and memes keep dying while we prosper because of their evolution and the useful knowledge they encode;
B – Or our Mind becomes our master, and we keep dying and suffering while memes simply feast on us, like bacteria.

The choice is ours, collectively.
You are now aware of The Meta Meme.