A totalizing memetic object (TMO) is a compact concept or ontological cluster that purports to speak for all that can in principle be explained. TMOs tend to offer explanations and assimilate conceptual machinery - especially other TMOs - across contexts, disciplines, and levels of abstraction. Unboundedness and high subjective beauty and interestingness makes TMOs often potent bwrms once apprehended.
A totalizing eigenbasis is a hypothetical sufficient set of independent totalizing objects that together span the explainable universe. A totalizing memetic object which purports to explain everything that has hope of explanation without reliance on any other concept is called a totalizing monad or meme singleton.
external definitions
A totalizing memetic object sort of purports to legitimately be about, or say things about "everything." "Everything" could be "reality," or "all of reality," or "everything that exists," "how the future will go," "the world," and stuff like that. There's also things that are "relatively more totalizing" than other things, because they say things about real or illusory "things that touch a lot of other things" or "things that have a lot of implications for other things."
known TMOs
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wave interference
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eigenmodes
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timelessness
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Turing machines
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attention
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Darwinism
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sets
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functional programming
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topological gender
The above list does not form an orthogonal ontological basis, as many of these TMO clusters overlap or subsume each other at some level of abstraction, as expected of TMOs with high fitness in a compressible reality. For example, variational principles in physics (and likely other manifestations) can be seen as a consequence of wave interference, and variational principles like free energy / entropy minimization are invoked in models of agency.
Some TMOs that had higher semiotic measure historically:
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Newtonian clockwork universe
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elemental bases
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God (as first and efficient cause)
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atomism
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animism
quotes about totalizing memetic objects
Some things are "totalizing memetic objects." (I may be using that quoted phrase in an idiosyncratic way!) A totalizing memetic object sort of purports to legitimately be about, or say things about "everything." "Everything" could be "reality," or "all of reality," or "everything that exists," "how the future will go," "the world," and stuff like that. There's also things that are "relatively more totalizing" than other things, because they say things about real or illusory "things that touch a lot of other things" or "things that have a lot of implications for other things." Examples in this category could be "minds," "truth," "goodness," "personhood," and things like that.
Here's a couple ways a (relatively) totalizing memetic object works: It might say compact, explicit things like this: "X is A, or X is B, or X is C, and nothing else." In that example, in so many words, it says that X could be three things and those three things are exhaustive. The "and nothing else" does a lot of work. "And nothing else" can be stated explicitly, as above, or it can implied or hinted at, intentionally or unintentionally, reflectively or unreflectively. Another thing about the above is that the mutual exclusivity of A, B, and C (and nothing else) make the assertion "tidy," and/or "explanatorily elegant." Elegant things can be sticky or attractive; they can kind "sink in," sometimes at least a little bit, whether a person wants them to or not, whether a person realizes it or not, at least at first.
I have long been fascinated by tessellations as metaphors for ways of knowing about and being in the world. A set of prototiles that can cover a world in an exhaustive and mutually exclusive way constitutes something like a theory of that world. The rules of the tiling are the rules of the world. The set of prototiles is the ontology underlying the theory. The size of that set is a measure of the efficiency of your understanding. Recognitions of repeating patterns in the emergent tiling are understandings of specific aspects of the phenomenology of the world. Actually creating a specific tiling by placing tiles on a smooth surface, to create navigable striations, is the praxis of the way of knowing.
To state it in terms of my new favorite frame, tessellations are something like metaphors for protocols of knowing and being. Given the right set of tiles, you can know the world and be in it, in a powerful way.
And from tiny, structureless rules out were coming space, time, relativity, gravity and hints of quantum mechanics.
We were doing zillions of computer experiments, building intuition. And gradually things were becoming clearer. We started understanding how quantum mechanics works. Then we realized what energy is. We found an outline derivation of my late friend and mentor Richard Feynman’s path integral. We started seeing some deep structural connections between relativity and quantum mechanics. Everything just started falling into place. All those things I’d known about in physics for nearly 50 years—and finally we had a way to see not just what was true, but why.
(...) Too much has worked. Too many things have fallen into place. We don’t know if the precise details of how our rules are set up are correct, or how simple or not the final rules may be. But at this point I am certain that the basic framework we have is telling us fundamentally how physics works.
It’s always a test for scientific models to compare how much you put in with how much you get out. And I’ve never seen anything that comes close. What we put in is about as tiny as it could be. But what we’re getting out are huge chunks of the most sophisticated things that are known about physics. And what’s most amazing to me is that at least so far we’ve not run across a single thing where we’ve had to say “oh, to explain that we have to add something to our model”. Sometimes it’s not easy to see how things work, but so far it’s always just been a question of understanding what the model already says, not adding something new.
— Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…and It’s Beautiful
In the RAF (Reflexively Autocatalytic Foodset-derived Network) framework, creativity is modeled as the ‘catalysis,’ or restructuring, of a new mental representation. RAF dynamics may result in a network that is self-organizing and self-sustaining, as well as able to self-replicate and evolve (in a relatively haphazard manner, without reliance on a self-assembly code). Cognitive structures self-replicate, in a piecemeal manner when individuals share ideas and perspectives. All living entities can be described in terms of RAF structure. Since RAF networks describe structure that is self-organizing, self-preserving, and self-regenerating, we posit that if an entity does not contain RAF structure (or something akin to it), there is no self.