A Day in the Life of a Meme.

Abstract

Like the information patterns that evolve through biological processes, mental representations, or memes, evolve through adaptive exploration and transformation of an information space through variation, selection, and transmission. Since memes do not contain instructions for their replication, our brains do it for them, strategically, guided by a fitness landscape that reflects both internal drives and a worldview that forms through meme assimilation. This paper presents a tentative model for how an individual becomes a meme-evolving agent via the emergence of an autocatalytic network of sparse, distributed memories, and discusses implications for complex creative thought processes and why they are unique to humans. A hypothetical scenario for the evolutionary dynamics of a given meme in a society of interacting individuals is presented.