Meme Containers

I will define a container as being something that carries things. This is an abstract mathematical concept but one that allows us to think about the properties and relationships of such as hosts, parasites and memes. My guess is that a mathematician would want to treat them with some set theoretical or relational position, or a computer scientist might consider them a generic type in programming. I’d rather not stray too far down those paths. Instead, I’m trying to model the types of things that a thing can carry or not. The view is predominantly from an informatics perspective, particularly of code that encodes itself, like a meme or gene or other replicator, and can be used to model things like an organism’s life-cycle such as that of the sycamore tree: pollen, germ, spinning-jenny, dicotyledon, sapling, mature tree. Moreover, containers should allow us to model memes – ideas that contain their own replication drivers. However, I fancy the notion could include: shopping bags, boxes of goods transported in a truck, patient zero on a plane, and all kinds of fleas with lesser fleas. I will elaborate on this approach in later articles.

So we have things that:

{can carry, can be carried}

which gives two boolean dimensions. If we expand this to consider the types of things that can be carried:

{own-type, other-type},

then that gives us three boolean dimensions:

{can carry own-type, can carry other-type, can be carried by other-type}.

Note that “can carry own-type” implies that can be carried by its own-type. Also, it is possible, in this treatment, to at once carry own and other type. So now we have a taxonomy of a phase-space of 8 possiblities of container, with an attempt at descriptive lables (these are for want of a better term and neither accurate nor definative), that can be depicted as a truth table:

Of importance, epidemiologically are {host, virus, hetro-container, universal container}.

Viruses are carried by a vector and contain their own information, but they do not transport other items.

A host is examplified by a reservoir species. The host carries its own information, but can also carry that of other types, such as a virus.

A hetro-container (HC) can be carried, can carry other items, but cannot carry itself. This is akin to product shipments allong the supply chain. A pallet woluld contain boxes, which would contain retail packaging, which would contain the actual goods. As a pure “set” like mathematical concept, a hetro-container might present Russelian grade paradoxes. It is included to complete the discussion of the phase-space, and also a warning of a potential mind-bender worthy of avoidance.

A universal-container (UC) has all three properties and can carry anything that can be carried, including itself.

For memetics humans are hosts, and we “contain”, or perhaps entertain, ideas. Ideas clearly can be carried (OK, so can humans, but we are in spherical cow space with this). Some of our thoughts are personal and do not spread, these would be “gems”; a gem, defined as something that can only be carried, can not carry itself, and so is sterile to replication. On the other hand, carriable ideas that can only carry theirselves would be pure replicators, without an effective payload. Like a chain letter such “viruses” would serve only to spread, but would have no other function. The “universal container” then would be an idea that contains itself (spreadable), but can also contain other, perhaps functional, ideas. From this basic taxonomy, we can  moves us towards a practical meme concept.