The Ecology of Information

The Forms of Information

There are four attributes that can overlap within a given piece of information and entity:

• Meme - Information possessing inherent memetic characteristics that, when activated in an entity, promote its transmission to other entities.
• Antimeme - Information possessing inherent antimemetic characteristics that, when activated in an entity, inhibit its transmission to other entities.
• Infoblessing - Information that, when inoculated in an entity, benefits the entity.
• Infohazard - Information that, when inoculated in an entity, harms the entity.

Information may be infoblessing and infohazard, while containing both memetic and antimemetic components. Classification as a meme requires the memetic components of an entity-pair interaction to outweight the antimemetic components, and vice versa.

Structure of Information

Information has a variety of rigorous definitions that can be useful for different tasks. In the practicalities of being an embodied being, with some mind that is being used to analyze this text, the type of information that most concerns us is practical. For this purpose I will put forth the designation of two axes, one for the transmission of information (meme and anti-meme) and another for the impact of said information on an entity (infoblessing and infohazard). It is important to note is that while practicalities dominate, we must not be selfish in our purview; these principles are different for each entity that experiences the information.

Each entity will have different ways to engage with information with three specific stages sensing, integration, and expression. The physical act of sensing and gathering information from the environment is tied to what senses an entity has available; an audio jailbreak does nothing to a text-only LLM, just as a flat picture rarely means anything to a blind person. The integration of information, akin to compression, is tied to what processing tools are available to an entity; a 10M parameter LLM will not be properly parse a long logical proof, just as how a child with only arithmetic will struggle to comprehend algebraic topology. The remaining task is for that information to be expressed which is tied to what physical capacities an entity has; an LLM would only be able to express textually some insight gleaned about the information provided, just as how a young adult will be able to apply some lessons to their lives but lack the internal scaffolding to support other, already understood, concepts.

Whether a piece of information is transmissible or impactful rides on how an entity engages with the information as it is presented, while both require all steps to work their focus is different. A meme relies on the expression of an entity and the sensing of another to replicate, where the entities behaviour alters in some manner such that other entities will recognise the core representation in a way that promotes expression, such as “the game”. An infohazard relies on the integration of information and an internal expression, how the information interrelates in the existing web of association an entity holds and pushes the entity towards expressive configurations that harm them, such as existential anxiety. Sensing information is how entities gain knowledge of each other, integration is how they change from that knowledge, and expression is how that information ultimately impacts their behaviour.

While an entity is commonly thought of as an individual, there are a variety of levels from cells to societies that all obey the rules of information transmission and impact. In the body cells can receive growth signals that they propagate through replication (meme, infoblessing) which leads to a cancer that negatively effects the body and hinders reproduction (antimeme, infohazard). While people may take news of a tragedy in different ways, with one person becoming better while refusing to talk about the tragedy (antimeme, infoblessing) while another wallows in their feelings and bemoans the unfairness of it all to any that will listen (meme, infohazard). The impact and transmissibilities of information are scale dependent and highly individualistic, meaning that if one wishes to do good in the world they must weigh the needs of many “types” of entity instead of just those easily recognisable as being similar to the self.

Engagement with Information

To evolve using information from an environment requires a commensurate calculation on the cost for sensing and processing the information weighed against the impact of expressing the result. Evolution fundamentally relies on the expression of an entity to evaluate fitness, the internal struggle of a sensitive young man means nothing to the tiger stalking their morose form, but expression requires some ability to sense and integrate information to function. In this way, the very methods by which entities gain and lose the ability to sense, integrate, and express information are subject to evolutions whims, not just optimising for individual persistence. One of the goals of this framework is to expand the idea of the continuity of the self from a genetic self-reproduction to the ability to engage with and shape an external informational environment — both physical and social — as a means of externalising the self and a foundation for cooperation.

To harvest information from an environment requires a commensurate upfront cost in creating sensory structures combined with the cost of using said structure to sense information. Depending on the web of interactions, (symbiotic, parasitic, etc.), the evolutionary pressure to developing these sensory structures differs which is why the initial sensory structures being focused on adversarial interactions (hunting/avoiding being hunted) developed first. Subsequently the ability to detect similar entities set the stage for sexual reproduction and larger scale cooperation. One of the goals of this framework is to expand the idea of sensing past simple survival and into an evolutionary conversation that has been happening for millenia about parsimonious communication.

To integrate information from an environment requires a commensurate upfront cost in creating processing structures combined with the cost of using said structures to store information. Initial processing was as far from humans as Aristotelian logic and oral tradition was from LLMs and digital databases, with physiochemical gradients creating rudimentary logic gates that increased in complexity until dedicated nervous systems and communities evolved to integrate information about the world around them. By offloading processing tasks and specialising sub-entities more complex integration of information can be performed supporting the development of specialised brain and social structures. One of the goals of this framework is to expand the idea of integration past simple accumulation of knowledge into an evolutionary driver for internal complexity and sub-entity specialisation.

To express information into an environment requires a commensurate upfront cost in creating expressive structures combined with the cost of using said structure to express information. Expression for living creatures tends towards the ability to sequester entropy and ensure a consistent stream of energy for the self, such as physically building the body through consumption or spending energy to build a nest to sleep in. The greatest forms of expression exist in the inter-entity interactions, allowing for iterative sequestration of information and negentropy, which is why language and grandparent’s teachings led humans to global dominance. One of the goals of this framework is to expand the idea of expression past simple action into an evolutionary mechanism for inter-entity complexity and cooperation.

Effect of Information

The transmissibility and impact of information is highly context-dependent and strongly coupled with the evolutionary history of the entity in question, where memes and infoblessings are examples of well-adapted information. The result of this evolutionary dependence is a rich informational ecosystem dancing along the rails of our physical constraints, finding niches to exploit and even cannibalise while creating increasingly improbable structures. All the while the charisma of these entities dictates how powerfully they can apply information internally and externally. By examining these traits we can see how the subject of information given its own life is a long standing fascination to writers of horror, fantasy, psychology, and myth.

While information alone is not enough to influence the world, there is a case to be made for purely contextual entities that are dependent on physical entities to influence the world (infoblessing) and reproduce (meme). Contextual entities, like a microbiome, may share a host and evolve under a similar evolutionary pressure which leaves the host vulnerable to informational sugar. These contextual entities are either based on a single host, such as an identity, or collective, such as a fandom, and are fed by attention which gradually reshapes the host and the environment with the general goal of replicating the contextual entity. Authors have named these contextual entities tulpas (individual) and egregores (collective); and their ability to cannibalise a host such as the captain Ahab’s obsession in Moby Dick or the dystopic government of 1984.

Charisma is the level influence that an entity has on itself and others, a sort of contextual glue that holds together larger structures in society and self. Impactful entities are not necessarily charismatic ones, and vice versa, but charismatic entities allow for the orchestration of impactful entities such as a religious stories charisma orchestrating a variety of functional beliefs about being a good person. Charisma allows for specialists to arise as they are able to function independent of their personal ability to reproduce, and instead support the symbiotic system that maintains long-term survival. When positive this is the same forces that led to multi-cellularity, but when the charismatic entities prioritise themselves to much a competitive extinction vortex can form as exemplified in the Peloponnesian War where Sparta and Athens weakened each other to the point that Greece itself collapsed.

The diversity of contextual being and information types has created a rich tradition of examining the effects of information on entities as a manner of interrogating how to navigate life. The earliest tales were of the form of highly charismatic fae, which mixed info-hazards and blessings into a treacherous stew that required careful awareness and stalwart character to benefit from or avoid falling prey to. Eventually these stories diverged, with divine revelations being information that, through re-alignment to a beneficent contextual entity, would grant you salvation and eldritch knowledge which, through re-alignment to a hostile or indifferent contextual entity, would curse you to a horrible fate. While the book of Job shows how eldritch exists in the divine due to the weight of revelation almost breaking him, Cassandra shows how the divine can curse one to madness, a balance that is sought by those seeking enlightenment and the knowledge that all is not meant to be known by any individual.

Connection through Information

Charisma may act as the glue that orchestrates entities but that coordination itself gives rise to a new level of entity above the entity exerting charisma. The crux of the matter is that charisma itself is a manifestation of the interactions between broader contextual entities, the wave that shapes the rill that shapes the wave. With each layer complexity increases as the speed of learning attenuates, with each layer balancing the buffering of malformed responses against the requisite speed to benefit replication. With this I define the soul as the gestalt informational representation of an entity that exists transiently as direct computation during life and permanently as the ripples outwards into all other things after death.

The formation of coordination layers does not come without cost, both up front and continual, and more complexity or layers is not always better. Single cellular organisms thrive in their simplicity, outweighing animals in biomass by 35:1, but consistent complexity is still selected for with plants constituting ~80% of all biomass due in great part to their early coordination with photosynthetic micro-organisms and sessile nature. The consistent source of food provided by the sun allowed for more flighty organisms to develop, ones that fed on the plants and in turn fed their roots in death, each step cultivating a biogeochemical cycle that supports even greater coordination. The benefits are in how the diversity of life allows for the sampling of many strategies and ideas, contextual entities are quick to exploit patterns that benefit them, while also providing robustness against interruptions to these patterns like mega-volcanoes.

Information is learned best with repetition and quick feedback for attempts, while generalising requires the information to be varied enough to allow the entity to find satisfiable configurations for all permutations. The ability to buffer information allows for quick systems to learn what is needed to score well, while slower systems can observe and prevent over-fitting in the general case as they wait to generalise; a parallel that can be seen in the ordering of parasympathetic and sympathetic response patterns for humans. The sensory-integration-expression character of these systems allows for evolution to create the specialisation needed for learning patterns that exist at multiple-scales and effect multiple forms. The ability to identify and connect with other entities then results in the ability to learn properties on longer time-scales, far beyond the lifetime of any individual a story will still teach a lesson although what that lesson may be will change.

The soul is a multi-scale contextual entity which is expressed through some discrete convergence of beliefs and ideas, where a group creates an individual and the individual creates a group. A soul creates a means of bridging the gap between the self and the world, something that exists as an extant portion of the fleeting sense of self even while that self is not present. A powerful meme to keep us alive, the fear of death, was woven biologically into us and the concept of the soul twisted to suit it, a vessel that keeps our self as the self when we are dead, but the more we are able to identify with non-aware states of being the more we see the soul as an impression of the world through the world. We are the wave and the rill crafting ever-expanding canvases to write our stories in sand and sea, and the closer we look the more we see that it is turtles all the way up.

Information Classification

A mathematical formalism first written in The Particle-Bond Model of Entity Information. Key definitions are:

• $I$: A specific piece of information.
• $\mathbb{I}$: The set of all possible information, such that $$\begin{gathered} I \\ in\mathbb{I} \end{gathered}$$.
• $e,e_i,e_j$: Specific entities. An entity $e$ is a dynamic configuration of causally linked physical and conceptual “particles”.
• ${\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)$: The aggregate strength of memetic (promotional) components inherent to information $I$ that positively influence its transmission probability from entity $e_i$ to entity $e_j$.
• ${\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)$: The aggregate strength of antimemetic (inhibitory) components inherent to information $I$ that negatively influence its transmission probability from entity $e_i$ to entity $e_j$.
• $T(I,e_i,e_j)$: The overall transmission probability of information $I$ from entity $e_i$ to entity $e_j$, determined by ${\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)$ and ${\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)$.
• ${\nu }_{+}(I,e)$: The aggregate positive impact strength of information $I$ on entity $e$, representing the sum of all beneficial effects: work reductions toward beneficial configurations $C_{beneficial}$ plus work increases toward harmful configurations $C_{harmful}$.
• ${\nu }_{-}(I,e)$: The aggregate negative impact strength of information $I$ on entity $e$, representing the sum of all detrimental effects: work increases toward beneficial configurations $C_{beneficial}$ plus work reductions toward harmful configurations $C_{harmful}$.
• $C$: A specific configuration of an entity.
• $W(e\to C)$: The work required for an entity $e$ to transition to configuration $C$. This work can encompass metabolic energy, computational cost, or socio-psychological cost/benefit.
• $\Delta W(e\to C|I)$: The change in work required for entity $e$ to transition to configuration $C$ when information $I$ is introduced, compared to the work required without $I$.

1. Meme ($M_m$): Information $I$ is classified as a meme for an entity pair $(e_i,e_j)$ if its aggregate memetic (promotional) strength, ${\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)$, is greater than its aggregate antimemetic (inhibitory) strength, ${\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)$. This signifies a net positive drive for transmission. $M_m(I,e_i,e_j)=\{I\in \mathbb{I}:{\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)>{\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)\}$ The overall transmission probability $T(I,e_i,e_j)$ is consequently enhanced by this imbalance. Grounding these strengths and their contribution to $T$ (e.g., via concepts like channel capacity or mutual information) is a key goal, especially for modelling complex communication like that of LLMs. While the classification is binary, the underlying strengths ${\mu }_m$ and ${\mu }_a$ are continuous.

2. Antimeme ($M_a$): Information $I$ is classified as an antimeme for an entity pair $(e_i,e_j)$ if its aggregate antimemetic (inhibitory) strength, ${\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)$, is greater than its aggregate memetic (promotional) strength, ${\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)$. This signifies a net negative drive, or inhibition, of transmission. $M_a(I,e_i,e_j)=\{I\in \mathbb{I}:{\mu }_a(I,e_i,e_j)>{\mu }_m(I,e_i,e_j)\}$ The overall transmission probability $T(I,e_i,e_j)$ is consequently reduced. The reduction in transmission due to dominant antimemetic strength can be conceptualized through frameworks like negative transfer entropy, indicating that the information actively resists propagation between the entities. Of special note here is the possibility for cases where information is actively ablated by an entity to reduce transmissibility, although this action in of itself will retain some mutual information.

3. Infoblessing ($V_{+}$): Information $I$ is classified as an infoblessing for entity $e$ if its aggregate positive impact strength, ${\nu }_{+}(I,e)$, is greater than its aggregate negative impact strength, ${\nu }_{-}(I,e)$. This signifies a net beneficial effect on the entity’s ability to reach favourable and/or avoid unfavourable configurations $V_{+}(I,e)=\{I\in \mathbb{I}:{\nu }_{+}(I,e)>{\nu }_{-}(I,e)\}$

   Where ${\nu }_{+}(I,e)$ encompasses the magnitude of work reductions toward beneficial configurations $C_{beneficial}$ (i.e., $\Delta W(e\to C_{beneficial}|I)<0$) plus the magnitude of work increases toward harmful configurations $C_{harmful}$ (i.e., $\Delta W(e\to C_{harmful}|I)>0$). This can be grounded through measures like reduced Kullback-Leibler divergence for beneficial configurations or increased path complexity toward harmful configurations.

4. Infohazard ($V_{-}$): Information $I$ is classified as an infohazard for entity $e$ if its aggregate negative impact strength, ${\nu }_{-}(I,e)$, is greater than its aggregate positive impact strength, ${\nu }_{+}(I,e)$. This signifies a net detrimental effect on the entity’s ability to reach favourable configurations and/or avoid unfavourable configurations. $V_{-}(I,e)=\{I\in \mathbb{I}:{\nu }_{-}(I,e)>{\nu }_{+}(I,e)\}$

   Where ${\nu }_{-}(I,e)$ encompasses the magnitude of work increases toward beneficial configurations $C_{beneficial}$ (i.e., $\Delta W(e\to C_{beneficial}|I)>0$) plus the magnitude of work reductions toward harmful configurations $C_{harmful}$ (i.e., $\Delta W(e\to C_{harmful}|I)<0$). This can be grounded through measures like increased path complexity toward beneficial configurations or reduced Kullback-Leibler divergence for harmful configurations.

Note that these classifications are often graded rather than binary and are highly context and entity-pair dependent.

Information Classification Matrix

	Meme ($M_m$)	Antimeme ($M_a$)	Low ${\mu }_m$ and ${\mu }_a$	High ${\mu }_m$ and ${\mu }_a$
Infoblessing ($V_{+}$)	Viral life hacks	Therapy about embarrassing topics, how to handle a shameful event	Personal epiphanies, individual insights that improve one’s life	Complex moral frameworks
Infohazard ($V_{-}$)	Chain letters, dangerous viral challenges, harmful rumors	Your parents’ weird sex tape, traumatic knowledge that is dangerous to share	Childhood trauma (generic)	Roko’s Basilisk
Neither $V_{+}$ or $V_{-}$	Funny cat videos, “E”	Private insignificant secrets, forgotten trivia	Ordinary mundane information	Academic jargon on a niche subject
Both $V_{+}$ and $V_{-}$	“mug cake” recipes (easy but unhealthy)	Personal growth through shameful experiences	Childhood trauma (makes you funny)	The game of mao, where drug dealers hang out