Mimetic Theory

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

nis0s

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5 comments

en.wikipedia.orgResearchstory

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Mimetic TheorySocial ScienceAutonomous Systems

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Mimetic Theory

Social Science

Autonomous Systems

Discussion about Mimetic Theory and its potential applications in autonomous systems.

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01Story posted
Sep 14, 2025 at 9:13 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (5 comments)

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nis0sAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

I wonder if anyone has tried creating mimetic desire in autonomous systems for alignment.

sunscream89

4 months ago

1 reply

Or allow alignment to establish mimetic preferences. What type of person is going to smoke? Sexy, cool, or wannabe? Markov that with other attributes and relational proximity statistics and you just might have your scenario.

Sounds like memetics, only it takes a frenchie to point out through the dimensions of desires and feelings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

nis0sAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

I feel like digital marketing did that to exhaustion, to the point that people seem to lose authenticity in order to belong somewhere. The cultural danger of this type of overfitting (either ideas to people, or people to ideas) is that you lose the chance to develop novel meme-complexes.

What will propagate if all that does is deterministic? I worry that such ideas will not be resilient or reliable across the kind of randomness life throws at you.

sunscream89

4 months ago

1 reply

“All that does is”? Eep!

We see it in different ways. Not determinism as in ideompotent operations, determination as in “what WILL you do next?”

My working definition of “will” is the “determination of resolve.” Meaning where reality contains uncertainty, information reduces uncertainty, and determination of resolve is any action generated in correlation to this progressive practice. All figuring out what we will do next. I suppose through the lens of what “motivates” us.

nis0sAuthor

4 months ago

I see your point, consider also that even people with the best intentions and skills misinterpret given inputs or information. The problem of figuring out motivations, or predicting next moves, is compounded by the multitude of options available to any given rational (and sometimes irrational) agent. Unless there are artificial constraints placed on an agent which limit available options, then I guess this sort of predictive work becomes easier.

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