1. In what sense are nations antimemetic? The mechanics of these attacks might be interesting to explore more broadly too. Defense Against Psychofaunic Antimemetics sounds like a great title lol
2. What is the intuition behind placing psychofauna below humans as far as conscious experience and agency? Separately, I know Joscha Bach has looked at levels of lucidity, which might also be a useful framework here (https://joscha.substack.com/p/levels-of-lucidity)
3. Have you considered how concepts like Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious relate to psychic megafauna?
1. I'm going to do a psychofauna safari on nations once I'm done rereading Imagined Communities, and this is a great prompt. Off the top of my head... Nations live and die with their antimemetic abilities: they are created with the collective forgetting and misremembering of history. They also have the power to blind the people they possess of the humanity of the people under their enemy psychofauna.
2. I suspect attributing human traits to other intelligences is a bias (which tbh I'm taking advantage of in using an animist lens). There is no reason to believe that what emerge from our minds also have consciousness just like how the unique traits of atomic Hydrogen and Oxygen do not necessarily appear in water as we perceive it as humans. My intuition is also probably influenced by Deutsch, Blindsight, and Christianity.
3. I have not read Jung. I'm curious of the connections you see!
1. Ah okay maybe the idea then is that the feature of psychofauna you are pointing to when you say "antimemetic" is their ability to do more than merely spread like a virus. They more actively engage in attenuation and even editing of the contents of consciousness. And if that's not it, I guess I'll see as you develop the ideas further.
2. Sure. I suppose though that not attributing agency and/or consciousness just seems like a different bias to me. I think more needs to be said to pump that intuition in others. One idea that's coming to mind is agency/consciousness is more evolutionarily expensive, so the default prior for an intelligence should be non-agentic.
3. Honestly, I haven't read too much either. Mostly just wikipedia and Jordan Peterson, hah. From what I have gathered, it seems like a possible connection is something like: As Chomsky is to Universal Grammar, Jung is to Universal psychofauna.
Nice! Some questions I had while reading:
1. In what sense are nations antimemetic? The mechanics of these attacks might be interesting to explore more broadly too. Defense Against Psychofaunic Antimemetics sounds like a great title lol
2. What is the intuition behind placing psychofauna below humans as far as conscious experience and agency? Separately, I know Joscha Bach has looked at levels of lucidity, which might also be a useful framework here (https://joscha.substack.com/p/levels-of-lucidity)
3. Have you considered how concepts like Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious relate to psychic megafauna?
Super interesting questions!
1. I'm going to do a psychofauna safari on nations once I'm done rereading Imagined Communities, and this is a great prompt. Off the top of my head... Nations live and die with their antimemetic abilities: they are created with the collective forgetting and misremembering of history. They also have the power to blind the people they possess of the humanity of the people under their enemy psychofauna.
2. I suspect attributing human traits to other intelligences is a bias (which tbh I'm taking advantage of in using an animist lens). There is no reason to believe that what emerge from our minds also have consciousness just like how the unique traits of atomic Hydrogen and Oxygen do not necessarily appear in water as we perceive it as humans. My intuition is also probably influenced by Deutsch, Blindsight, and Christianity.
3. I have not read Jung. I'm curious of the connections you see!
1. Ah okay maybe the idea then is that the feature of psychofauna you are pointing to when you say "antimemetic" is their ability to do more than merely spread like a virus. They more actively engage in attenuation and even editing of the contents of consciousness. And if that's not it, I guess I'll see as you develop the ideas further.
2. Sure. I suppose though that not attributing agency and/or consciousness just seems like a different bias to me. I think more needs to be said to pump that intuition in others. One idea that's coming to mind is agency/consciousness is more evolutionarily expensive, so the default prior for an intelligence should be non-agentic.
3. Honestly, I haven't read too much either. Mostly just wikipedia and Jordan Peterson, hah. From what I have gathered, it seems like a possible connection is something like: As Chomsky is to Universal Grammar, Jung is to Universal psychofauna.