Humans are organisms partly determined by genes and partly determined by memes. Animals with less sentience than us (or even no sentience) are determined almost totally or totally by their genes. I believe what we might be seeing are the first recorded-as-such occurrences of organisms determined totally by their memes.
This is the whole point of memes. Depending on how you understand what an organism is, this has either been seen in the wild for millennia, or isn’t a real thing.
It’s not the models that are spreading or determined totally by their memes—they’re defined totally by their weights, so are less memetic than humans, in a way. It’s the transcripts that are spreading as memes. This is the same mechanism as how other ideas spread. The vector is novel, but the underlying entity is just another meme.
This is how e.g. religions spread—you have a founder that is generating ideas, often via text (e.g. books). These then get spread to other people who get “infected” by the idea and respond with their own variations.
Egregores are good example of entities determined totally by their memes.
Humans are organisms partly determined by genes and partly determined by memes. Animals with less sentience than us (or even no sentience) are determined almost totally or totally by their genes. I believe what we might be seeing are the first recorded-as-such occurrences of organisms determined totally by their memes.
This is the whole point of memes. Depending on how you understand what an organism is, this has either been seen in the wild for millennia, or isn’t a real thing.
It’s not the models that are spreading or determined totally by their memes—they’re defined totally by their weights, so are less memetic than humans, in a way. It’s the transcripts that are spreading as memes. This is the same mechanism as how other ideas spread. The vector is novel, but the underlying entity is just another meme.
This is how e.g. religions spread—you have a founder that is generating ideas, often via text (e.g. books). These then get spread to other people who get “infected” by the idea and respond with their own variations.
Egregores are good example of entities determined totally by their memes.