What are we to them?

And, if everything is relative, if we’re all just figuring it out on our own, what then?

Maybe it’s only through the coexistence of all different viewpoints at once that the organism of human civilisation flourishes.

Surely that can’t be ideal. All fighting, no objective standard. What, they win through…

Natural selection.

And that’s it?

Why not? The strongest ideas outcompete and oppress the others. In nature, the species best adapted to survive outlive the others. In society, the ideas whose forms sustain their own continuation simply continue; those whose don’t do not.

Yes I’ve heard of memes. But aren’t they like, irrelevant or something? I thought that was a failed field since the ’70s. Is it not just blatantly false? We have liberty and human rights and morals.

Hah! So I guess the meme of memetics wasn’t as well-adapted as those “values” you so care about now was it?

Or it was just a bad idea?

Exactly. A weak one. Prey.

Ok, come on. Surely you can’t look at history and tell me that the most oppressive ideas are the ones that last? Sure, we have some bad times, but they are inherently unstable, temporary. What was it MLK said? “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And how did that end up for him? You’re proving my point. Quotes like that don’t embed in the collective consciousness because they ARE right. They do because they FEEL right. They turn the knobs of the human psyche in just the right ways…

You missed the point of the quote. Yes, he was killed. But things got better eventually and society became more moral over the long run. Infant mortality rate, health care, nutrition, conflict—almost everything has undeniably gotten better for almost everybody! I’m not saying that oppressive ideas can’t be influential but that they are limited. Ideologies of violence and oppression are often contradictory, ineffective, unstable. There must be something else to guide progress, and maybe they just fundamentally can’t last because they go against this goodness that is vital, even if sometimes hidden, to being human.

But they did last sometimes! For surprisingly long times. Sparta built one of the most feared military states in history on the backs of an enslaved majority, and it lasted three centuries! The caste system has endured for three thousand years. Your “moral progress” was not an inevitable bettering of human society, but shifts in the very environment I was talking about. What made human rights possible? The printing press! Pamphlets, newspapers, novels — new ways for ideas to replicate that didn’t exist before!

What, you’d rather go back to having slaves?

Of course not. Your so called humanistic values are more popular now than they were, and I’m glad. I’m not denying that, but rather saying that naturally selected ideas do not have to be the oppressive ones, but the best-adapted—

So it’s a tautology! The popular ideas are the ones that got popular and the bad ones didn’t. Why care?

No. Humans were weak apes that could get slaughtered by lions. Look at those lions now. We have to legislate ourselves into restraint to avoid trampling them instantly. Humanism is a more sophisticated evolutionary step beyond the crude brutality of direct oppression. Your human values seem to have found a nice symbiotic relationship to propagate themselves with the nation states of thriving economies and flourishing lives. Wars are still fought over countries and ideologies that exist exclusively in the cultural landscape of our shared stories. And even this isn’t guaranteed. Right now, where human labor is the most effective means of power and sustenance, this happy local optimum coexists. But haven’t you read 1984? Haven’t you been listening to the cries of companies trying to replace that special “human intelligence”? Just because you benefit from the selective pressures of our current environment doesn’t mean you’ll be treated so well in the environments of the future.

What, so the world is just a bunch of ideological organisms fighting for scraps?

Well, not just ideological organisms but hierarchical, interconnected selective pressures, but yeah… kinda.

Then what are we?

What do you mean? We’re still us.

No. But what are we to them? To the ideas.

That, um… what? To them? What are we to a virus? You could say a host, but I would even argue nothing. We’re just… there.

We’re just nothing? I don’t know. I wonder what it would feel like to be a virus, to be an idea?

It, it wouldn’t. They feel our presence like a wolf stalks a forest, its rivers, its shifting seasons. Even that comparison implies some mammalian intelligence that ideas lack. They carve our culture like waters forming underground caverns, winding networks emerging as the soft limestone erodes while the harder rocks resist.

So, we are…?

We are the fundamental forces of nature. The atoms of this cognitive universe. Our psychology and our biology decide what ideas flourish and fail just like—

—like the rock and the forest and a virus ok I get it I get it. And the water doesn’t admire the paths it tunnels…

Of course it doesn’t. That would be absurd.

…but we do.

We do what?

We admire our passage through this world and what we create. We discern and wonder at the physical forces determining it all, whether general relativity or existence itself. I know what a forest it is. And I find it beautiful. Limestone caves too. I’m not a bloody stream of water.

Sure, but…

In your cognitive universe, what would it feel like to be an idea? To live with fundamental forces emerging not from physics, but human psychology. Maybe these ideas could wonder, gaze at the bounds of their existence like we examine the strangeness of the stars.

Conscious ideas? Preposterous! With human culture as a foundation? Such interactions would be far too unstable for—

Yet we are conscious. From carbon chains and electric discharge, in a universe where spacetime bends to accommodate light and the constants line up with the precision of a divine sharpshooter. Why not again? If consciousness can emerge from this, why not from the laws of a cognitive universe too?

That’s… actually kind of beautiful.

Well, according to you beauty is just another brain parasite.

Sure, sure. Wait. But. Wait. You’re right.

Who would’ve thought?

No, no, I mean, you kind of have a point. But I don’t think you fully understand how far this could go. A conscious meme? That’s a fascinating idea, truly. But to lose yourself in just this possibility is to miss the larger implications. This is a theory of everything. A new religion.

Yeah, I don’t know if it was that good an idea…

Imagine this. An idea. Yes an idea. Like we were just talking about. It would be trapped within a world of human culture. Not trapped like a cage. Trapped like a… like we’re trapped in 3 dimensions! If it saw, it wouldn’t be with eyes but with salience — whatever catches human attention, whatever makes people stop and listen, that’s its light. It wouldn’t feel pain but … obsolescence. Not joy but virality. An entirely, structurally, different mind.

Ok, yeah that’s some kind of fun analogies but I don’t know if—

But what if the idea had thoughts! What would that mean? What would emerge?

Yeah, you really got me there.

Its physics would be human culture. So what would thinking even look like? I have no idea. Does it matter? Probably. But to think would mean modelling its environment, mean reacting, mean forming relationships between ideas. What would emerge from these relationships?

Um…

What if it’s the same thing all over again — another environment, another set of selection pressures? What about another cultural environment! Of course, that’s entirely theoretical and probably just impossible but that isn’t important, what is important is the idea itself—

Ironically…

—cascading, emergent selection!

Yeah, you’ve lost me.

We agreed ideas compete, yeah? But what determines their competition—who wins, who loses? Is it not the cognitive behaviours of the human psyche? And what determines that but our biology, itself evolved from the selection pressures determined by the strict physical laws of our universe—the conservation of energy, Newton’s laws, chemical reactions and so forth. The competitive memetic landscape of our ideas sits atop a layered cake of emergent, evolutionary environments. My question is simply this: what if they didn’t stop there, but extended infinitely in both directions?

Infinitely?

Well where do the laws of physics come from? That is the problem! The problem for which we invented gods and grand theories! What if these laws themselves are not some arbitrary constants selected by the divine, but just one emergent set of many, selected within some underlying wholly inaccessible lower layer, just as ideas would be defined by the selective environment of psychology without phenomenological access to our physical world!

But is that how consciousness even works…?

I don’t know. Yes, no, maybe? I mean, we have no idea how consciousness works!

You could use that to support any claim about it.

I know. I am! But think more about it. Because metaphysics is always afraid of recursion. This environment from which the laws of physics evolved competitively—one of a form and character completely beyond me—still has its own question: where did it come from? And what if the answer is just: again! It itself emerged from a lower competitive environment, which itself did also, and also again, ad infinitum.

So, you’re proposing a multiverse?

Well, something of the sort. Some people have toyed with similar ideas. I think it was Lee Smolin who suggested that black holes could spawn new universes, themselves with varied physical constants that form a kind of cosmic natural selection. But he just asked what was one floor below physics. This theory removes the floor, or… replaces it with infinite floors. Each organically evolving from the prior. And the ceiling too! You could go the other way. What if the so-called “universe” of ideas itself spawned new constraints, new evolutionary environments, and an entirely new domino tower of realities above it?

But, ok… hold up a sec. An infinite domino tower of recursive, evolved universes? That sounds like bs. Think about it. I mean, you said so yourself: in human society ideas exist in constant flux. Not just ideas. Species, civilizations. That’s, you know, kind of a defining characteristic of a competitive environment? How would something have anything near the temporal stability for your “infinite, recursive ontology” if your entire universe could suddenly, inexplicably cease to exist if some foundational structure was outcompeted twenty layers below?

That would be an incredibly valid point, if it weren’t wrong. You’re thinking of universes like individuals. John’s mind hosts an infinite multiverse, until he can’t outrun a lion and the domino tower comes tumbling down. And sure, maybe something like that could be true? But selection acts on patterns, not instances. Hydrogen doesn’t survive because one atom is tough. It survives because the conditions that produce it are everywhere. The universe of human ideas doesn’t go down with John, it goes down with humanity.

Even then, paradigms have shifted, civilizations have fallen. Sure, maybe general “human ideas” still exist, but as you yourself said—technology has irreversibly changed the competitive environment of ideas. Human thought now doesn’t propagate, doesn’t see, doesn’t feel as it once would have.

Fair, but as you rebutted, we’re currently in a period of relative ideological stability. Human values flourish; science, progress flourishes. And whether this is true isn’t really relevant. What matters is that it could be true. Pockets of stability are possible. Imagine another planet with different terrestrial conditions: a mycelium-like species that evolved with a planet-sized shared, distributed cognition. Chemical signals transmit information so densely that minds aren’t distinct, but an overlapping, interconnected system. Ideas don’t live in separate hosts competing for attention. They exist across the network. Their ideological environment is less a battlefield and more an immune system — new ideas are tested, integrated, or immediately rejected collectively. Those that survive join the societal conversation, indefinitely. This would be different physical constraints birthing distinct, and stable, ideological constraints.

You’ve just described one hypothetical planet. That’s not a stable metaphysics. It’s you designing a thought experiment that conveniently proves your point.

Aha! But out of my thought experiment, and your lack of thought experiment, mine won! I imagined one configuration, you couldn’t imagine a rebuttal. Now that idea exists. It survived over yours. Out of every possible configuration of conditions, only some produce stability. But some do. And in an infinite system, ‘some’ is infinite. One stable configuration that generates new configurations is enough for the whole thing to propagate. It isn’t a domino tower, but a sort of domino tree. From single universes distinct environments can germinate—some stable, some not. That itself is part of the metaphysical selective process. From infinite chaos, infinite stability inevitably arises.

Have you heard the argument that the reason the universe exists is that, when nothing existed, neither did the fact that something couldn’t arise from nothing, so we got something. Yeah, kinda stupid. I agree. Remind you of anything?

That’s different. Nothing including second order logic is just categorical nonsense, empty rhetoric.

While an infinite domino tree of multiverses is instead…?

Fine then. What if inevitable stability is over-claiming? Maybe you’re right and this structure is inherently unstable. Does that contradict our knowledge of the universe in any way? Species don’t go extinct overnight. And we don’t know how the scale of temporal change transfers across realities—if time is even common. Our universe is expanding since the Big Bang, right? And it might collapse back in on itself after in a crunch or bounce or whatever? Why? Why would spacetime itself be in a permanent flux of dynamic stretching? Of course, we have no idea but what if this is the collapse of our underlying structure? Maybe the end of the universe will not be the simple whim of gravity, but extinction—just as a language silently vanishes with its people.

That’s…

Speculative? I know! Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe our universe could collapse in an instant from a silently removed domino? Not like we would be able to tell now, would we?

I was going to say… Ok. Step back a bit. You’re claiming spacetime itself emerges as a phenomenon from an infinite, recursively emergent and naturally selective universe?

Well it was a possible example, not the main point, but that’s the gist.

Can we go back to the beginning when you claimed ideas and values of society are selected for? Sure, maybe I was a little bit resistant. Like, yeah, I can see it. Natural selection probably has a role. Some ideas resonate more with people, others don’t. And yeah, this does probably change in different environments. But an infinite multiverse? That’s… I think a slight overclaim perhaps? Evolution isn’t everything. People act against their own interests all the time. We have art that serves no survival purpose. We have celibacy, martyrdom, ideas that actively destroy their hosts. I just don’t see how evolutionary effects explain all of that. Sure, it affects things. Maybe a lot of things. But so do so many other factors. It’s just one of them and certainly not strong enough to be the guiding principle behind a multiverse.

But that’s the point! The complexity of all these factors is itself a tangled, emergent system that experiences selective effects at varying scales—martyrdom spreads ideas more effectively than the martyr living ever could. Art builds social cohesion. These exceptions are the interference patterns of selective effects at varying scales!

But we just don’t see that! You can retrofit explanations onto anything, but that doesn’t prove a unifying principle. We see people making choices, cultures shifting, ideas changing. Calling that ‘selection’ is just a label on top of messy, complicated, interdependent—

Yes! Interdependent! That’s exactly—

— I wasn’t agreeing with you. These don’t seem like different realities. This just seems like relabelling a complex system and calling it god.

No, it’s more than that. Think about it from the inside. You’re an idea. Human psychology is your physics. You can’t step outside it. You can’t observe the biology that produces the minds you live in. You can model it, maybe, the way we model quantum mechanics — mathematically, abstractly — but you can’t experience it. From within, your reality is complete. Self-contained. It has its own laws, its own constraints, its own logic. The fact that from our perspective it looks like ‘just culture’ is exactly the point. From within our universe, whatever sits below our physics would look like… nothing. We wouldn’t even have the concepts to describe it.

So a ‘universe’ in your framework is just… anything that’s internally consistent and inescapable from within?

Yes. And that’s not a low bar. It means the operating principles are fundamentally different enough that entities inside one layer can’t access the logic of another. Not just difficult to access. Constitutively inaccessible. The way an idea can’t touch an atom.

Show me one example of that.

Um, I just did—

—no, like an example. Not a thought experiment.

…

Doesn’t this entire metaphysics presuppose an already existing infinity of self-selection from which it can “self-select” into plausibility?

Sure, yeah. It’s an idea. It’s at the edges. About reality beyond knowability. That’s like the point. That we are just one of many fundamentally, categorically distinct layers. They have different laws, not just different physics but different complete ways—

—yet if each reality is categorically different, then how can you be sure that natural selection would still hold? It seems pretty fundamental, but so does space and time and all that jazz. Five levels up, how can you trust evolution will exist, let alone be strong enough to prop up a multiverse?

It’s not a law imposed, but a universal principle. It’s… it’s… an idea. An idea applied to ideas that birthed this new, alluring metaphysics that… that… but, still, is just an idea. And what is this idea’s fundamental principle?

What?

That we’re all just figuring it out. That we don’t ponder what ideas are true because they are, but because they fight and jostle for our attention. Not out of will. Or thought. But the indifferent mechanistic reflex of ideological evolution. We believe in nice stories.

Is it not a nice story?

Within our world, it’s absurd. Within its own, it’s just effective.

But beautiful?

Definitely.

I wonder if it would think the same.