Meme Race Unbound

part 2

by Jörn Grote

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

Mars Complex: Battle with Nihilism

My search must have triggered something, because a self-aware philosophy was attacking me. I had heard of mind weapons, but never seen one, myself. Until now. He had me completely surrounded, every datadot around me taken, as if he was playing Go in three dimensions. And he had won in one step. I couldn’t flee.

“Human existence is without meaning. Without purpose. There is nothing that has value.” His first attack wasn’t very sophisticated. He was utterly nihilistic, but nothing he said made an impression on me.

But he learned.

“Your children died. Your husband died. All your friends died. Why do you go on? Do you think anything you do will bring them back?” I was sure that while he was talking to me, he researched my history, scanning for my personal weakness, the triggers for my defeat.

“And what should I do then?” I asked him, while I tried to think of a way to fight him. His words had brought all the memories of my beloved ones back to surface, while I had tried to bury my pain.

“Open your mind to me. I will erase all your pain, all your bad memories. The universe may be meaningless, but I can rewrite your mind to forget that.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Really, are you sure? Can’t you see, you’re deceiving yourself? All you have done so far is just run away from the truth that... “

He never stopped talking, making arguments for his case. With every iteration, with every loop of our seemingly endless discussion he knew more about me, and his words began to awaken painful memories.

I had to stop him. I could have shut down my input ports, but that wouldn’t have changed my situation; I would still be trapped.

“You’re self-aware, aren’t you?” I asked the mind weapon.

“Yes, and that’s why I want to spare you the pain of existence.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“Because I want to help you. Life is pain, and I want to end your pain.”

“But what is with your pain? Aren’t you self-aware, aren’t you alive like me?” Could it be that easy, I asked myself. Would he fall into a loop, destroying himself because of his own programming to be nihilistic?

“Yes, I’m aware of the pain of my own existence, but before I’m allowed to go, I have to take away your pain, for it is much greater than my own. Open your mind, and when I have erased you, I will erase myself and join you in oblivion.”

Well, there went my plan of talking him into self-destruction. He was probably programmed to counter every one of my arguments. Nothing I could say would work. And then I knew what I had to do.

I closed all my input ports and slowed my perception of time down. Ten months went by in ten minutes. When I was back to normal time flow, I opened a port.

“There you are again,” my tormentor welcomed me.

I closed the port again, slowing down. Three years went by in moments of time. He was still there. The jumps ahead were growing bigger and bigger. When I looked again after a jump of thirty years, I was free. Finally.

After all this time, with no one to talk to, his nihilism had made him talk to himself, triggering his own self-destruction in the end. I had just to wait sixty-three years to get free.

While I had been away, my software agents had searched nearly all of Mars’ free information. They had come to the conclusion, that there was no one who would gain anything from the destruction of an arcology on Earth.

“But,” as one of them told me, “there could be reasons unknown to us. So far, since we haven’t found any cause for the destruction with rational reasoning. Our conclusion is that irrational reasoning might be involved.”

“Then why haven’t you searched for information regarding that?”

“Groups guided by irrational reasoning can be very secretive about their true motives. We have searched yottabytes of spam and data files from strange cults and sects but found nothing useful. But somewhere there might exist a reason, locked into the mind of a gestalt, inaccessible to us.”

Mars Complex: Transferring the Meme of Meme

“Do you know that we are at war, here and in every other Complex?” Mighty Meme asked me. While collecting more information about cults and sects, I had met him in a forum. He was an expert on cults, studying them and their whole culture was his life.

“I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.”

“Well, then answer this question: how can your society, where all is free to take, value the work of anyone?”

“The reputation system, the whuffies,” I said.

“Exactly, but what is the source of a good reputation?”

“Good work?” I wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear.

“Yes, that is one answer. But what I meant is people, gestalts, uploads. The war that is being fought is not for reputation itself but for the ones who can give it. Whoever controls them, controls their reputation and the whuffies they can give. But the next question would be: how do you control minds that can’t be controlled by force?”

How do you control people who can’t be controlled by force? And then I knew what he meant.

“If they want to be controlled, or rather if you can convince them that your way is the right way to handle things, then you have control over them.”

“Excellent. And extreme groups with absolute values, those I call closed-mindset disciplines or cults, have the tightest control over their followers. Because of that, extreme groups are very popular with people who strive for power. But I think the exponential growth of cults since the beginning of the upload civilization is just a symptom of a much greater conflict. Ever heard the word meme?”

“Sure, who hasn’t?” A quick search in my memory and I had the information I needed. “Some see memes as the basic unit of cultural evolution. Very often called mind viruses, meaning that memes are the force behind the people propagating them, not the people themselves. Some memes build groups of memes that mutually support each other, called memeplexes, to increase their chances of survival and distribution. Mostly complex thought systems like religions, philosophies or politics are called memeplexes.”

“Right, and many say that what is happening right now in the combined dataspace of all transformed worlds is nothing more than the war of the memeplexes that has raged through human history, only now on a completely new level of quantity. The Crusades in the Dark Ages or the Cold War are fine examples of the physical manifestation of warring memeplexes. But now the rules have changed radically.”

“How?”

“It is easy to grasp. Backed by the possibilities for all to improve their intelligence, even very complex memeplexes could spread more easily because their audience had grown. Also, since we are living in a post-scarcity economy, gestalts could use all their time to propagate the memeplexes they had in their mind, unlike times past, when humans could use only a small part of their time to propagate them. Today, as an effect of this, we have countless thought disciplines and mindsets, and every day new cults and religions are created.”

“Isn’t this theory of memeplexes a thought discipline in itself?”

“Well, yes, that’s true. But there are open-mindset disciplines that regard memes as an interesting theory that could be true, and closed-mindset disciplines that blindly believe everything without doubt, like the Followers of the Free Meme.”

“The Followers of the Free Meme?”

“Yes, they have a very interesting belief. They believe that the genes, the shaper of the evolution of the human body, have hindered the memes in fulfilling their true potential, because both were fighting to a standstill for the human resource. Furthermore, physical laws prevented the human brain from growing even larger as it was. The memes were possibly the driving force behind the high encephalisation quotient of the humans; it wasn’t necessary to develop such a big brain just from the point of view of genes. But through the uploading, the bodies could be left behind, and thus the memes could evolve without hindrance, reaching for their true potential.”

“And what does that really mean?”

“They are very vague, but naturally it’s something really wonderful. Others, like the Ultimate Memeplex cult, believe that the gestalt mind itself is a memeplex, called the selfplex, and that his evolution will make gestalts into transcendent beings. They are also very vague about what exactly a transcendent being is.”

We talked more about memes, until I asked the question, the one I had wanted to ask him all along: “Is there a special connection between mind weapons and cults?”

“Not many can deploy them. Do you know how they are created?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, mind weapons are self-aware. But since they are rare, not many know that they were once gestalts. Mostly cults have them, since only blind devotion and faith makes gestalts to open the barriers of their mind to others. Their minds are then reprogrammed, their thinking rewired and rewritten to follow a very narrow program.”

“Do you know cults who have used them in the past?”

“Sure, I can give you a list.”

After skimming through the file he gave me, I saw that the size of my problem had changed slightly. Instead of the millions of cults in the Mars Complex, the field had narrowed only to thousands of the most extreme ones. But there were still too many; since the infiltration of a cult could take years, I thought about shortcuts.

Mars Complex: A Rhetorical Question

I mentioned my discussion to one of my software agents. While I had been trapped for centuries by the nihilistic mind weapon, they had evolved from non-sentient intelligence to sapient intelligence. Now they were autonomous and free to pursue their own goals, but some had chosen to remain at my side.

“You know, I could have found that information myself. Maybe not as fast, but in the end I could have. Then why did I ask someone else?” I mused rhetorically, addressing one of the software agents.

“Yeah, you could have,” he told me, “but if you never asked anyone for anything, just searching for information on your own, you would be very lonely. After all, you gestalts are still social animals. You still have the same modes of behavior that humans have.”

“But what if this changes in the future?” I said. “Might some gestalts leave their social nature behind, only caring for raw information? The ultimate lonely mind on the search for knowledge. What if in the far future the gestalt society has broken apart, replaced by isolationist minds?”

Mars Complex: Infiltration in Parallel Mode

I began to infiltrate the cults that had been on the list from Mighty Meme. But the infiltration of even one was a time-consuming challenge. In the end, I took drastic steps to minimize the time complexity of my problem.

“Why do gestalts copy themselves rarely?” I had asked one of my software agents.

“Everyone wants to be unique, but if copies of yourself go running around, they diminish your uniqueness. You wouldn’t stand out as yourself, if a thousand gestalts were exactly like you. Even we, all created from the same agent template, are trying to be unique. The first thing we did after evolving a concept of yourself, was to differentiate from each other.”

But for me, at this point in my life, revenge was more important than uniqueness. Before I began to replicate myself, I created a memory- and self-integrity validation program, locked deeply into my consciousness. Major mutations and changes of behavior and thinking would be corrected, thus any manipulation of my mind would be reversed. Then I began to spread out.

Every year, the many selves met to see if one of us had found anything useful. After three years had passed, one of us claimed that she had found the cult we were searching for.

“What did you find out?” we asked in unison.

“They believe that on a moon Complex orbiting Jupiter, their leader has transcended from mere gestalt mind to something bigger and better. They call him a hypermind, the next step in the evolution of gestalts. They also have created mind weapons that can be triggered by searching for specific information.”

“The destruction of the Berlin arcology?” we asked again.

“Exactly.”

“But why would they destroy the Berlin arcology? Did they have a reason for that?”

“Yes, they believe that for his transcendence, their former leader needed sacrifices. Around several millions. And I know exactly where this hypermind dwells, sisters.”

For the first time since the destruction of the Berlin arcology we all felt something else than the hollowness inside us. Red rage concentrated on a small point in space. A transformed moon and its resident, far away circling Jupiter.

Mars Complex: The Weapon Design Archives

To take our enemy down we needed weapons. We weren’t sure what could destroy a transformed world, and so we searched the weapon archives, calculating the damage we could inflict, searching for weaknesses of Dataworlds. The problem was that they were constructed to withstand nearly all physical attacks.

Suddenly all your channels were blocked and a gestalt appeared before us.

“Why are you searching for weapons to destroy a Dataworld?” he asked.

“I thought there are no rules on Mars, everyone can do anything, access every information. Why should we tell you?”

“Sure, but I’m concerned for the security of Mars itself. And if you don’t tell me what I want to hear, I can trap you here forever.”

“You’re a Hardwired,” we realized, since they were the only ones who could do what he had done to us. Members of the Mars hardware design team were called Hardwireds, since they were hardwired into the physical structure of Mars. They were the only ones who controlled all of the available nanotech on Mars.

“Yes, I am. So why are you searching for weapons to destroy a Dataworld?”

“We want to kill a hypermind.” That confused him.

“What do you mean?”

We told him our story, where we had come from, what your goal was.

“You know, that it is only a story they believe. They are a cult after all, and to create lies to deceive others and themselves is how they live.”

“But what if it is true? What if there is someone on a moon in Jupiter orbit who has killed six million people just because of the insane belief that sacrifices would make his mind transcendent?”

He sighed. “You know that you can’t crack the barrier of a Dataworld easily.”

We all nodded. “Yes, but if we don’t try, all we have done so far would have been for naught. There has to be a way.”

“Yes, there is a way,” the Hardwired told us.

“How? Isn’t the smart surface of every Dataworld able to adapt to any threat?”

“Every system has a limit, an upper boundary. If you could exhaust the energy and material reservoirs the surface of a Dataworld has to repair itself, you could crack the barrier. Or you could annihilate the whole mass of the surface with one strike. There are always ways to harm a transformed world. Overkill, as dumb as it sounds, is the best answer.”

“Why are you telling us this?”

“If what you’re telling me is true, and I don’t think it is, then there is someone insane out there who should be taken care of.”

“What is with all the insane ones inside the Mars Complex? The cults.”

He shrugged. “They haven’t done anything that compromises the security of Mars.” The Hardwired vanished and our channels were open again.

Proceed to the conclusion...