Dissertation
Dissertation: Memes as Channel Codes
Section titled “Dissertation: Memes as Channel Codes”Applying information theory to understand how ideas propagate, evolve, and compete for transmission across noisy human channels.
Core Thesis
Section titled “Core Thesis”Meme fitness correlates with compressibility: Ideas that spread successfully are those that can be efficiently compressed and reconstructed with minimal loss across imperfect transmission channels.
Research Questions
Section titled “Research Questions”- Compression: Why do proverbs, which are lossy compressions of complex truths, spread more successfully than detailed explanations?
- Channel Capacity: What is the “bandwidth” of human-to-human idea transmission, and how do memes adapt to it?
- Error Correction: How do successful memes encode redundancy that survives garbled retelling?
- Selection Pressure: Can information-theoretic metrics predict which ideas will dominate cultural transmission?
Structure
Section titled “Structure”- Why Information Theory? — The case for an information-theoretic approach to memetics
- Compression Hypothesis — The central claim and its formal statement
- Notes — Research notes, derivations, and working documents
- References — Bibliography and source materials
Current Status
Section titled “Current Status”This is active dissertation research. Notes are working documents that evolve as understanding deepens. Some contain unresolved questions marked with TODO.
“The meme is the message—but only if it fits through the channel.”