Hey Veeky Forums a comment in another thread () made me think about what the structure of memes as a whole concept might look like.
Being in love with categorical thinking, I'd like it to be some sort of category, with objects being individual specific memes, or classes of memes.
Some thoughts I had: >Subcategories are considered classes of memes >Generalizations of memes are embeddings of subcategories (IE original pepe embeds into the shitstorm pepe we have today) >Mixing memes can be seen as some sort of quotient of a coproduct >For example pic related is a quotient of the coproduct (Feels guy + Pepe + Puff the magic dragon)
If anyone else has any thoughts on the categorical structure, or on a different structure of memes in general, please use this as your circlejerk hut.
>puff the magic dragon whoops I meant dragon tails.
Daniel Hill
NO
Wyatt Lopez
Yeah I'll fuck around with math as much as I want, regardless of your brainlet repulsion.
Obviously the hardest part is going to be coming up with the correct notion of a memorphism. Maybe one that maps a subset of meme classes to the same subset of meme classes?
Pepe maps pepe into pic related?
Leo Young
Like, would this count as an isomorphism?
No conceptual data was destroyed or created, it was just rotated.
Bentley Lewis
on the other hand, would this be an injection/monomorphism?
No data was destroyed, but I added some.
Caleb Moore
You aren't thinking categorically until you define your morphism semantics.
Are arrows supposed to represent evolutions of memes? If so, what is it about memes that distinguishes this category from a generic state space? How is equality of parallel arrows defined?
Jeremiah White
These are just ordinary functions (with set-theoretic universe given by the image boundary, and individual sets as the collection of nonwhite pixels).
As a general rule of thumb, categorification is premature if you can't come up with a nontrivial endomorphism.
Ryan Rivera
okay so yes, the rotation is a normal set valued function, but im more interested in preserving the underlying network of concepts. It just turned out that the rotation preserved a lot of relevant concepts even though it was just represented by a set function.
The monomorphism example, yes it is also somewhat a set valued function, but moreover it embedded the conceptual network of the pepe feel dragon, into the pepe feel dragon plz respond.
Of course right now our ideas are just in intuition, im hoping you all will help me get to something rigorous.
Landon Turner
One of the mantras of category theory is that the arrows (verbs) are more important than the objects (nouns).
I'm not saying that modeling memes is fruitless, nor that categories are useless. I am saying that they go together like helices and planetary motion (i.e. not at all; I'd upload epicycle.jpg if I wasn't stuck in a meeting and forced to phonepost).
Zachary Cooper
what is needed is actual taxonomy-domain, kingdom,phylum, etc.- when thinking about the evolution of memes shit gets complicated. Factoring in origin sites, convergent evolution, horizontal meme transfer. We need to look at this from an ecology/evolutionary biology lens.
David Bell
It's a difficult task considering there is no generally agreed upon "objects" with which to work. Is Pepe considered a basic element, or is he a memetic quotient of a coproduct of a frog with a human? This portion of the science is sufficiently complicated enough. I would say that a good starting place to find a common set of objects to work with is archetypes we have.
But even this is somewhat insufficient. Let's say we take a frog and a human as the basic objects which compose Pepe. What differentiates between Pepe and Kermit? It's possible to differentiate between the two in substantial ways (Pepe is sadder and more juvenile, Kermit is more mature) but its difficult.
Furthermore, you can take a frog and a human as basic objects, but get something that's more "human" than "frog." What functor produces that?
You would really have to be able to define the most basic "qualities" that you see in memes (happy, sad, etc.), find a way to map those onto a language of human archetypes that are fairly universal, and then produce relationships that produce an accurate schema (are able to get "Pepe" from sad frog person) of the basic elements. It's a monumental task.
Elijah Williams
You should distinguish between the meme and what it's applied to. assuming meme has a single interpretation it should have some sort of structure that defines that interpretations. I would look at that structure as a sort of converter that converts some "normal" situation or drawing or w/e to a "meme'd" situation or drawing or w/e that should result in laughter or w/e should it accomplish. So i see the "thing that it's applied to" as that situation. So the meme didn't change, just it's input did. And so you could categorise memes by it's structure. Memes that have that kind of structure are the same and the first one that had that structure is OC. Change of situation or w/e doesn't change the meme but change in structure creates new meme. I'm not a mathematician but i had some thoughts on this. Hope it means something.
Jackson Allen
There also should be a "pure" meme without the object that it's applied to. That would be a blank who would win meme
Nicholas Bell
>I would look at that structure as a sort of converter that converts some "normal" situation or drawing or w/e to a "meme'd" situation or drawing or w/e that should result in laughter or w/e should it accomplish. It's certainly more categorical, and we could form a chain of equivocations:
memes ideas to be transmitted information (in the sense of Shannon) data (in the sense of CS)
which would pin down the source/target objects of memes to be "contexts", and then the meme category would become a kind of syntactic category.
This sounds like an interesting machine learning project desu
Nathaniel Morris
Jesus christ this thread, do you even know what category theory is?
Camden Davis
Pierces memeopythagrian categories
Matthew Davis
That pic related is a Dragon Tales reference. Nothing to do with puffing a magic dragon
Cameron Ramirez
Here are some memetic categories.
Asher Foster
So how would one deal with the fact that the category of memes is by definition itself a meme? Sounds like we will run into problems with set theoretic stuff in general, might require something else like HoTT.
