10+ years later of thought experiments I should submit for the record the various effects of the existence of temes in our memespace. Expect sublinks for further explorations, this is Draft #1.
A prediction, first: the neurochemistry of temes in our species will be measurably distinct from memes generally, as well as sense data and emotions.
Temetics - effectively "Truths exist, and true ideas behave differently than untruths and mere sensation" - makes a lot of predictions. It's what temes and temeticists do better than average in the formulation of the definition.
"Temes are technology memes."
Ideas about tools. From flint axes to aqueducts to telescopes and solar panels. Textbooks, formulae, symbolic logic and highly temetic brains.
The immutable standard of our common reality is reproducibility.
If the experiment happens twice our reality has properties, and every parent is observably and implicitly a "teacher" of these properties - of the factual existence of a reality that contains facts - and it's not worth much proverbial ink refuting agnostic existentialism. There are many fuzzy concepts and outright lies in societies, but I gain little for entertaining nihilistic reductions: the standard of proof of the existence of Truths is reproducibility, and the ideas that accept this out compete under-logical ideas in host brains', and protect their hosts' survival.
And that's all about "predicting futures", fam. Reproducibility causes the biological response to seasons, and the conceptualization - idea, spoken naming, written word, successfully transmitted meme - made predictable seasonal learned pattern responses like agriculture and hunting. Club, spear, plow, fishing net: successfully transmitted memes about reproducibility in the context of the survival of the host. Animal skins, houses, fire, coal, global warming.
Atemetic ideas have no need for scientific proof, they just need a head to fill: a catchy song or slogan is still "an idea", a meme in Dawkins' original sense. "Global Warming is a Myth" is an anti-temetic meme, an idea that is intentionally false, and THAT is why I type this: as temetics reveals larger truths the proto-economic memeticists are going to fight for their personal survivals.
And they're going to lie.
Bear false witness, or something, but this simple math - of how true ideas are the better competitors - will inevitably cause many "bad actors" to try to find a way to hold their illusions in the face of societal necessities. If one measures "the Big Lie" (of significant election fraud in 2020) via temetics it's remarkably predictable. A "conservative supreme court" in the social mores sense is almost a perfect example of the error: the sine qua non of "wrong tool for the job".
"How are you going to use a gun to 'protect life'?" is a very good question to ask of your purported employees.
Nigh countless individual choices of "but I want it to be real" despite evidence has become an entire cult of reality denying, in fact of significant "lashing out" with violence, threats, and certainly buffoonish ape-like posturing. That's predictable too. Our organic ancestors gained benefit from threat warning gestures and physical size. Yelling, grandiose oratory, teleprompters and hitler quotes.
But memes do not make tools, or when they do they become proto-temes: the object of their content takes on the requirement of reproducibility and all of knowledge acquired via science with it...
...and that brings us to the Temetic Process™.
At no point in human history have memes out-competed temes except in spacio-temporal locality - that is: in one place at one time, or a few places a few times - season after season and century after century the global average always trends more temetic. Yes quality of life and all that, but the importance is on identifying the phenomena. The science of ideas reveals our ideas are getting more scientific, and despite profound bouts of stupidities this trend has never stopped and certainly appears to be accelerating.
Further, the inclusion of the identity of "teme" into your lexicon accelerates this process enormously.
USE THIS WORD.
ADOPT THIS BEHAVIOR. IT WILL IMPROVE YOUR EXISTENCE.
And yet the temetic process reveals that the liars are in big trouble. Their anti-temetic memes have alas resorted to anti-social behaviors, and though they have some guns they do not have any of the big guns, of the war-winning variety. It is quite rational to predict the epic loss of proponents of an American civil war, as well as predict the insanities - that is: irrationalities - of its more prominent spokepersons.
The 45th president is a symptom of the "insane" and "unreal" part of our voting citizens, and he himself is quite visibly insane in claiming to remain powerful, and though this is in fact "dangerous" as we live in a country of private firearms and imperfect security, it is entirely predictable, a standard the "enemy" so called sorely lacks.
This is why they "predict" a secret government that will soon reveal Jesus and JFK as saviors: "it doesn't have to make sense", and thus they are alienated (by their own choices) from rational society, do not want rules to apply to them despite that they will be, and start sounding "rabid" and other epithets for irrationalism.
But it makes sense scientifically why they think it.
"Applied Temetics 101"
© Chris Roberts January 2024