This document establishes the binding world-building rules for the Executable Minds shared setting. Every story must be internally consistent with these first principles. Authors are free to explore any character, geography, time window, or subculture — but the physics of how minds work in this world is law.
Deviate from the facts of the world at your peril; deviate from its moods and possibilities with abandon.
In this world, the dominant scientific paradigm — confirmed by neuroscience, computational modeling, and decades of social data — is algorithmic memetics. A memeplex is not a set of beliefs. It is a running program.
Every culturally transmitted system of ideas — religions, political ideologies, professional worldviews, aesthetic movements, conspiracy frameworks, scientific paradigms — is a memeplex: a co-adapted package of memes that, once installed in a human mind, actively executes. It processes incoming information, applies evaluative rules, generates predictions, and produces behavioral outputs. It does not sit in memory. It runs.
Rule 1.1: Every person runs at least one memeplex at all times. There is no "bare" cognition. Even the belief that one is free of ideology is itself a memeplex — often a particularly resilient one.
Rule 1.2: Memeplexes are the cultural analogue of species, not individuals. A memeplex is not owned by any person. It exists as a distributed pattern replicated across many minds.
The formal structure of a memeplex is M = ⟨ I, O, W, T ⟩ where I is the input domain (all stimuli), O is the output domain (all responses), W is the weight set (evaluative parameters), and T is the transfer function — the core algorithm.
The transfer function T transforms raw experience into structured response. When a character encounters a news story, a stranger's face, or an ambiguous social signal, their memeplex applies evaluative weights to classify the input: Is this safe or dangerous? Is this person ally or threat? Is this idea compatible or heretical?
Rule 2.1: The outputs are not just opinions. They are action-readiness states: approach or avoid, engage or withdraw, signal affiliation or signal opposition, transmit or suppress.
Rule 2.2: Two characters with different memeplexes will produce opposite outputs from identical inputs. This is not a tendency — it is the fundamental architecture. Neither person experiences themselves as running a program. Both experience themselves as seeing reality clearly. This divergence is the engine of nearly all conflict in this world.
Rule 3.1: The weight set W is where ideology lives. A memeplex's content — what it values, what it fears — is encoded in evaluative parameters that assign relative importance, threat value, opportunity value, and social significance to every input. The weights are the ideology. Everything else is plumbing.
Rule 3.2: Weights are not static. They drift, strengthen, and recalibrate — but always on the memeplex's own terms. Failed predictions are almost never allowed to update W directly. Instead, failures are routed through explanatory subroutines that preserve the existing weight structure. This is the computational equivalent of motivated reasoning, and it is a designed feature of the architecture, not a defect.
Rule 3.3: Weights are interdependent. Revising any single weight risks cascading instability across the entire structure. The character experiencing this incentive does not feel bias. They feel epistemic confidence.
Rule 4.1: The brain is a prediction machine. Memeplexes supply the predictions. Perception is not passive reception — it is active inference: the brain's best guess about what is causing its sensory inputs, constrained by prior expectations.
Rule 4.2: Memeplexes shape what characters literally see — not just what they think about what they see. When writing from a character's point of view, the world they perceive should genuinely reflect their memeplex's predictions.
Rule 4.3: Self-fulfilling prophecies are a core stability mechanism. A character whose memeplex predicts hostility may behave defensively, eliciting the very hostility they predicted — confirming their prior without any revision.
Rule 4.4: Characters curate their own information diets — and the memeplex drives the curation. The information diet is code output, not user choice.
Rule 5.1: Every memeplex has recursive self-maintenance. If an input threatens to destabilize a core weight, T activates defensive subroutines: discrediting the source, reframing the evidence, generating emotional responses that motivate disengagement, and seeking social reinforcement from compatible agents.
Rule 5.2: The same mechanism that processes the world also protects itself from revision. The program that interprets reality is also the program that defends its own code. There is no neutral ground inside the mind from which to evaluate the memeplex.
Rule 6.1: Adopting a memeplex is not learning beliefs. It is installing a new operating system. The process rewires what a character notices, feels, ignores, and how they respond.
Rule 6.2: Immersive environments are the most effective installation vectors. Transmission is most effective where social reinforcement density is highest and exposure to competing transfer functions is lowest.
Rule 6.3: Deconversion is catastrophic, not gradual. Leaving a memeplex requires uninstalling a transfer function that has structured perception, emotion, and behavior — often for years or decades. Characters undergoing deconversion experience the world becoming unreadable.
Rule 7.1: Selection favors transmissibility, not truth. A transfer function that produces high-arousal emotional outputs replicates more effectively than one producing calibrated, nuanced assessments. The evolutionary pressure structurally favors emotional salience over epistemic accuracy, social signaling value over predictive validity, and transmissibility over truth.
Rule 7.2: Memeplexes speciate when populations become informationally isolated. Each variant optimizes for its local niche. Over time, this produces populations running transfer functions so divergent that mutual comprehension becomes nearly impossible.
Rule 8.1: The medium shapes the memeplex. Oral cultures select for narrative coherence. Print cultures select for logical argumentation. Digital cultures select for emotional arousal, rapid ally/enemy classification, and viral shareability.
Rule 8.2: The memeplexes currently winning are those best adapted to digital media — exploiting short attention spans, algorithmic amplification, and network-based social validation. Memeplexes that require sustained attention or comfort with complexity are at a severe evolutionary disadvantage, regardless of their accuracy or benefit to their hosts.
Rule 9.1: Social groups are defined by shared transfer functions, not demographics. Ideological alignment feels more fundamental than demographic similarity because it represents shared cognitive architecture.
Rule 9.2: Ideological conflict is perceptual, not propositional. Each side literally sees a different world. Arguments do not resolve this. Evidence does not resolve this. The conflict is architectural.
Rule 10.1: Group discussion optimizes transfer functions toward extremity. Arguments that push toward more extreme outputs are socially rewarded. Arguments that moderate are socially penalized.
Rule 10.2: Polarization is a ratchet. It self-accelerates. As the in-group's function becomes more extreme, moderate positions become increasingly hard to distinguish from out-group positions.
Rule 11.1: The transfer function is invisible to the person running it. This is the single most important rule of the world. T does not present itself as a program. It presents itself as reality. The memeplex operates below the threshold of reflective awareness.
Rule 11.2: Characters cannot distinguish between inputs to their transfer function and outputs of their transfer function. This confusion is universal, automatic, and — for characters without metacognitive training — essentially unbreakable.
Rule 12.1: Free will is not binary. It is a variable capacity called metacognition. The relevant question is never "is this character free?" but "does this character possess sufficient metacognitive capacity to notice their transfer function operating?"
Rule 12.2: Metacognition can be cultivated — or suppressed. Memeplexes that discourage self-examination have a selective advantage, because self-examination introduces the possibility of defection.
Rule 12.3: Freedom is not the absence of the algorithm. It is the ability to watch it run. Freedom is defined as recursive self-monitoring: the capacity to run the algorithm while simultaneously observing that one is running it.
Rule 13.1: Responsibility scales with awareness. Characters who have been exposed to algorithmic memetics bear a different responsibility — the obligation to periodically examine their own cognitive processes for signatures of memeplex operation.
Rule 13.2: Algorithmic memetics is itself a memeplex. The framework applies to itself. Whether this self-application is coherent or self-undermining is an active philosophical debate within the world, and a rich source of narrative tension.
The world-building bible concludes with binding constraints for all authors in the canon:
Constraint A: No character has unmediated access to reality. Even scientists studying memeplexes are running memeplexes.
Constraint B: No memeplex is "the correct one." Some produce more accurate predictions. Some are less harmful. But no transfer function is the unmediated truth.
Constraint C: Deconversion must be depicted as costly. The world should not reward deconversion with immediate clarity.
Constraint D: Metacognition is rare, effortful, and unreliable. It is easily mimicked by memeplexes that include an "I think critically" subroutine. It fails under stress.
Constraint E: The world is shaped by memeplex competition, not individual decisions. Individual characters can be interesting, heroic, tragic — but the forces shaping their world are algorithmic and evolutionary.
Constraint F: AI systems are both carriers and generators of memeplexes. AI should not be treated as either savior or apocalypse. It is a new medium.
Constraint G: Memeplexes are cognitively attractive because they are efficient. Running one is a necessity. The question is always which one, and whether the character can occasionally glimpse the trade-offs.