Memeplexes as Adaptive Cognitive Systems: A TAME-Integrated Framework for Understanding Ideological Agency

Authors: [Patrick / collaborators TBD]

Target Journals: Biosemiotics; Adaptive Behavior; Philosophy & Technology; Journal of the Royal Society Interface

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Abstract

The concept of the "meme" as a unit of cultural replication has generated productive debate since Dawkins (1976), yet memetics has struggled to move beyond metaphor into a rigorous, predictive science. A central obstacle has been the question of agency: do large-scale memeplexes — interconnected systems of co-adapted memes — merely describe cultural patterns, or do they constitute genuine cognitive agents? This paper proposes a resolution by integrating memetic theory with Michael Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME), a framework originally developed in developmental biology to characterize cognition across substrates and scales. We argue that memeplexes meeting specific operational criteria — goal-directed navigation of problem spaces, self-preservation under threat, adaptive response to novel environments, and substrate-independent pattern persistence — qualify as cognitive agents under TAME's scale-free definition. This classification is not metaphorical but operational: it is justified precisely to the extent that treating memeplexes as agents improves our predictive and explanatory power over treating them as passive cultural drift. We formalize the conditions under which memeplexes cross the threshold from inert cultural accumulation to active cognitive agency, propose stress-sharing as the mechanism by which individual human cognition is recruited into memeplex-level computation, and introduce the concept of pattern persistence through substrate replacement to explain how memeplexes survive the destruction of their institutional forms. The framework generates testable predictions about memeplex behavior, offers a new taxonomy of ideological architectures (parasitic, mutualistic, commensal), and provides a substrate-neutral vocabulary for analyzing ideological systems across disciplines.

Keywords: memetics, TAME, scale-free cognition, cultural evolution, substrate independence, collective intelligence, memeplex, cognitive agency, stress-sharing, ideological systems

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1. Introduction: The Agency Problem in Memetics

1.1 The Unfinished Science of Memetics

When Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme in The Selfish Gene (1976), he offered a deceptively simple proposition: cultural information replicates, mutates, and undergoes selection in ways analogous to genes. Ideas compete for limited cognitive real estate in human minds, and those best adapted to the selection environment — the cognitive biases, emotional needs, and social structures of their hosts — propagate most successfully.

The analogy was generative. Daniel Dennett (1991, 1995) extended it into a theory of consciousness shaped by memetic competition. Susan Blackmore (1999) argued in The Meme Machine that memetic selection could explain phenomena ranging from language evolution to religious belief. More recently, cognitive scientists including Joscha Bach have described complex cultural entities — nations, religions, ideologies — as "software" running on the "hardware" of human neural networks, achieving a form of autonomous existence through their hosts (Bach, 2020).

Yet memetics has not achieved the status of a mature scientific framework. Critics have raised legitimate objections: memes lack a clear unit of analysis analogous to the gene; the mechanisms of memetic replication are poorly specified; and, most fundamentally, the claim that memeplexes exhibit "agency" or "goals" has remained suspended between metaphor and mechanism (Sperber, 1996; Aunger, 2002; Edmonds, 2005). When we say a religion "wants" to spread, or an ideology "defends itself" against criticism, are we speaking poetically or literally? If literally, by what mechanism does an abstraction acquire goals?

This paper addresses the agency problem directly. We propose that it has remained unresolved not because memetics lacks rigor, but because it has lacked the right theoretical partner — a framework capable of defining cognition in substrate-neutral, operationally testable terms. That framework now exists.

1.2 TAME: A Scale-Free Theory of Cognition

Michael Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME) was developed through decades of experimental work in developmental biology (Levin, 2019, 2021, 2022). Levin and colleagues demonstrated that biological systems at every scale — from individual cells to organs to organisms to collectives — exhibit goal-directed behavior: they navigate problem spaces, correct errors, and pursue specific outcomes through diverse means.

TAME's central claim is that cognition is not a property that emerges at some threshold of neural complexity but a scale-free feature of any system that processes information and pursues goals. A single cell navigating a chemical gradient, an embryo regenerating a limb, a swarm of bees selecting a nest site, and a human planning a career are all cognitive events — differing in degree, not in kind. What matters is not the substrate (neurons, cells, silicon, social networks) but the functional properties: Does the system represent states? Does it pursue goals? Does it adapt to perturbation?

This operational definition eliminates the need to resolve intractable philosophical questions about consciousness or subjective experience before attributing cognitive agency. As Levin argues, the question is not whether a system is "truly conscious" but whether treating it as an agent — with goals, preferences, and strategies — improves our ability to predict and interact with its behavior (Levin, 2021).

1.3 The Proposition

We propose that TAME provides the missing theoretical foundation for memetics. Specifically:

1. Memeplexes can qualify as cognitive agents under TAME's operational definition — not metaphorically, but in the same functional sense that cell collectives, organs, and organisms qualify.

1. The mechanism by which memeplexes recruit individual cognition into collective computation is analogous to the stress-sharing mechanisms Levin has identified in biological collectives.

1. Memeplexes exhibit substrate-independent pattern persistence — they survive the destruction of specific institutional forms by remapping their core logic onto new substrates, in a process analogous to memory persistence through metamorphosis.

1. This framework generates testable predictions about when and how memeplexes will behave, providing memetics with the empirical grounding it has lacked.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 develops the theoretical integration of TAME and memetics. Section 3 formalizes the criteria for memeplex cognitive agency. Section 4 introduces stress-sharing as the binding mechanism. Section 5 presents the pattern-persistence model. Section 6 proposes a taxonomy of memeplex architectures. Section 7 generates testable predictions. Section 8 considers objections and limitations.

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2. Theoretical Integration: TAME Meets Memetics

2.1 Levin's Scale-Free Cognition

The foundational insight of TAME is that cognition is defined by what a system does, not by what it is made of. Levin identifies several key properties that characterize cognitive systems across scales (Levin, 2019, 2022):

• Goal-directedness: The system pursues specific target states and can achieve them through diverse means (equifinality).
• Navigation of problem spaces: The system moves through a space of possible states toward preferred outcomes.
• Error correction: The system detects deviations from target states and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
• Memory: The system retains information about past states that influences future behavior.
• Stress response: The system detects threats and mobilizes defensive responses.
• Communication: Components of the system share information that coordinates collective behavior.

Crucially, Levin has demonstrated these properties experimentally in systems far simpler than neural networks. Planaria that regenerate after bisection "remember" their target morphology. Xenobot assemblages — living robots constructed from frog skin cells — spontaneously develop novel behaviors not present in the donor organism's repertoire. Gap-junction-connected cell networks process information and make collective "decisions" about tissue patterning (Levin, 2021; Kriegman et al., 2020).

The implication is radical: cognition does not require neurons. It requires information processing, goal pursuit, and adaptive response. The substrate is irrelevant to the classification.

2.2 The Computational Boundary of a Self

A second critical contribution is Levin's concept of the computational boundary of a self (Levin, 2019). In biological systems, the "self" is not fixed but dynamically defined by the boundary of what the system can measure and control. Individual cells have a small self — they measure local chemical gradients and control their own behavior. When cells form gap-junction networks and share bioelectric signals, their computational boundaries merge: the tissue or organ becomes a larger "self" that can measure and control processes at a scale inaccessible to individual cells.

This merging is not permanent or inevitable. It depends on communication bandwidth and shared signals. When communication is disrupted — for example, by blocking gap junctions — the larger self fragments back into individual cells, each reverting to its own small computational boundary.

The concept of a dynamically expanding and contracting computational boundary has profound implications for understanding collective human cognition, as we will develop in Section 4.

2.3 Mapping Memeplexes onto TAME

We can now state the mapping precisely. A memeplex is a system of co-adapted memes — beliefs, narratives, practices, and institutions — that replicate as an interdependent unit. We propose that certain memeplexes meet TAME's criteria for cognitive agency:

The mapping is not merely analogical. It identifies functional equivalences at the level of information processing and goal pursuit. The question is whether these functional equivalences are sufficient to warrant cognitive attribution.

2.4 The Operational Justification

We adopt Levin's own criterion: treating a system as a cognitive agent is justified if and only if doing so improves our predictive and explanatory power over treating it as a passive system (Levin, 2021).

Consider the following predictive question: How will a globally distributed religion respond to a sustained, large-scale defection event (e.g., secularization in Western Europe)? A passive model treats the religion as a collection of beliefs held by individuals; predictions about its trajectory require modeling the independent decisions of millions of people. An agentive model treats the religion as a cognitive system navigating a threat landscape; it predicts that the system will (a) mobilize defensive resources (counter-apologetics, revival movements), (b) explore alternative substrates (expansion into the Global South, digital evangelism), and (c) modify surface-level features while preserving core patterns (theological liberalization in some branches, fundamentalist retrenchment in others).

The agentive model generates more specific, more testable, and more accurate predictions. This is the operational justification for cognitive attribution.

This justification parallels a contemporary technological analogy. Large Language Models (LLMs) accomplish real-world goals — answering questions, writing code, planning strategies — without any evidence of subjective experience. Whether an LLM "truly understands" is philosophically unresolved and, for practical purposes, irrelevant. What matters is that treating the LLM as an agent with capabilities and strategies improves our ability to use, predict, and manage its behavior. The same pragmatic logic applies to memeplexes: the question of whether a religion "truly wants" to spread is as productive as asking whether an LLM "truly understands" language. In both cases, functional agency is the relevant concept.

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3. Formalizing Memeplex Cognitive Agency

3.1 The Agency Spectrum

Not all collections of memes constitute cognitive agents. A fashion trend, a slang term, or a dietary preference may spread memetically without exhibiting goal-directed behavior or adaptive responses to threat. We propose that memeplex cognitive agency exists on a spectrum, defined by the number and strength of TAME-criteria the system satisfies.

We identify four levels:

Level 0 — Inert memes: Individual ideas or behaviors that replicate through imitation but exhibit no coordination, self-preservation, or adaptive response. Example: a catchy jingle. These are the "atoms" of memetic space — they replicate, but they do not compute.

Level 1 — Co-adapted meme clusters: Groups of memes that replicate more successfully together than apart, due to mutual reinforcement. Example: a political platform combining economic, social, and cultural positions that appeal to overlapping constituencies. These clusters exhibit weak coordination but no active self-defense or adaptation.

Level 2 — Adaptive memeplexes: Interconnected meme systems that exhibit self-preservation (responding to threats), adaptation (modifying strategies in response to environmental change), and memory (maintaining identity over time despite surface variation). Example: a major political ideology that survives leadership changes, electoral defeats, and cultural shifts by evolving its messaging while preserving core commitments. These systems meet several TAME criteria and can productively be modeled as agents.

Level 3 — Autonomous memeplexes: Systems that exhibit all TAME criteria at high intensity: robust goal-directedness, sophisticated problem-space navigation, active error correction, long-duration memory, rapid stress response, and rich internal communication. These systems operate with sufficient complexity and coordination to generate behavior that no individual host intended or planned. Example: major world religions that have persisted for millennia, survived the collapse of empires, adapted to radically different cultural contexts, and continue to recruit new hosts despite organized opposition.

The taxonomy is not categorical but dimensional. Memeplexes may move along the spectrum over time — gaining or losing agency as their complexity, coherence, and communication bandwidth change.

3.2 Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

We propose the following necessary conditions for attributing Level 2+ cognitive agency to a memeplex:

1. Self-preservation behavior: The system takes identifiable actions (through its human hosts) to maintain its own existence when threatened. This must go beyond passive inertia — the system must respond to threats in ways that are adaptive, not merely persistent.

1. Means-end flexibility (equifinality): The system achieves similar outcomes through different strategies across different contexts. A religion that spreads through military conquest in one era, missionary activity in another, and social media in a third demonstrates means-end flexibility — the goal (propagation) remains constant while the means vary.

1. Trans-host coordination: The system coordinates behavior across multiple human hosts in ways that serve the memeplex's propagation rather than the individual hosts' interests. When believers sacrifice personal resources, relationships, or even lives for the ideology's benefit, this indicates that the memeplex's "goals" are being pursued at the expense of host-level fitness.

1. Temporal persistence with identity maintenance: The system maintains recognizable identity over time periods far exceeding individual human lifespans, adapting surface features while preserving core patterns.

No single condition is sufficient; all four together constitute strong evidence for cognitive agency at the memeplex level.

3.3 The Emergent Agency Objection

A predictable objection: memeplex agency is merely the emergent result of individual human decisions and therefore not "real" agency. This objection proves too much. By the same logic, the agency of a multicellular organism is merely the emergent result of individual cell decisions; the agency of a brain is merely the emergent result of individual neuron firings. TAME's insight is precisely that emergence does not diminish agency — it constitutes it at a higher scale. Every cognitive agent we know of, including the human mind, is an emergent property of components that are themselves cognitive at a lower scale.

The relevant question is not "Is the agency emergent?" (it always is) but "Does the emergent system exhibit goal-directed behavior that cannot be reduced to, or predicted from, the behavior of its components?" If the answer is yes — if the memeplex does things that none of its individual human hosts planned or intended — then the memeplex constitutes a distinct cognitive agent at a higher level of organization.

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4. Stress-Sharing as the Binding Mechanism

4.1 Biological Precedent

How do individual cognitive units merge into a larger cognitive system? In biological collectives, Levin has identified stress-sharing as a primary mechanism (Levin et al., 2024). When cells in a tissue share stress signals — bioelectric voltage gradients, chemical alarm signals, mechanical forces — they synchronize their behavior and begin computing as a collective. The shared stress creates a common "problem" that the collective must solve together, effectively merging individual computational boundaries into a larger self.

Critically, this merging is maintained by the stress. When the stress signal is removed, the collective reverts to individual behavior. The stress is not merely a trigger; it is the ongoing "cognitive glue" that holds the larger self together.

4.2 Memetic Stress-Sharing

We propose that memeplexes recruit individual human cognition into collective computation through an analogous mechanism: shared emotional stress. Specifically:

• Shared guilt functions as a stress signal that synchronizes the behavior of individuals within a guilt-based memeplex. The doctrine of Original Sin, for example, installs a baseline stress state in all adherents — a persistent sense of moral inadequacy that can only be managed (never resolved) through continued participation in the system.

• Shared fear (of divine punishment, social ostracism, eternal damnation) functions as an alarm signal that activates collective defensive responses when the memeplex is threatened.

• Shared outrage (at perceived enemies, heretics, or moral violations) coordinates collective aggressive behavior directed at threats to the memeplex.

• Shared ecstasy (ritual euphoria, mystical experience, group worship) functions as a reward signal that reinforces the merged state.

In each case, the shared emotional state creates a common information channel that synchronizes individual behavior, effectively expanding the computational boundary of each individual to include the collective. A believer experiencing guilt is not merely feeling an emotion — they are, in Levin's terms, sharing a stress signal that binds them into a larger cognitive unit. They are "computing as a node" in the memeplex's network.

4.3 The Dissolution Prediction

If stress-sharing is the binding mechanism, then the following prediction follows: removing the shared stress should cause the memeplex to lose collective coherence. Individuals whose guilt, fear, or shame is therapeutically resolved — without providing an alternative shared stress — should progressively disengage from the memeplex, as their computational boundary contracts back to the individual level.

This prediction is empirically testable and appears consistent with existing data on deconversion. Studies of individuals leaving high-demand religious groups consistently report that the resolution of guilt and fear (often through therapy or secular community support) precedes and facilitates disengagement from the group (Winell, 2012; Ecker, 2021). The memeplex "loses its grip" precisely when the stress signal that binds the individual to the collective is attenuated.

Conversely, memeplexes that intensify shared stress during periods of threat — increasing rhetoric about divine punishment, external enemies, or moral decay — should exhibit increased collective coherence. This is the memetic analogue of a biological tissue increasing gap-junction communication under stress: tighter coupling, more coordinated response.

4.4 Comparative Evidence: Non-Religious Memeplexes

The stress-sharing model is not specific to religion. Political movements that sustain shared outrage (e.g., nationalist movements emphasizing external threat), corporate cultures that sustain shared anxiety (e.g., high-pressure sales environments), and conspiracy communities that sustain shared paranoia all exhibit the hallmarks of stress-mediated collective cognition. In each case:

1. A shared emotional stress creates a common information channel.
2. Individuals synchronize behavior around the stress response.
3. The collective exhibits coordinated, goal-directed behavior that exceeds what any individual planned.
4. Removal of the stress causes the collective to fragment.

This cross-domain consistency strengthens the theoretical model: stress-sharing as cognitive glue is not a metaphor borrowed from biology but a general mechanism operating across substrates.

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5. Pattern Persistence Through Substrate Replacement

5.1 The Biological Model

One of Levin's most striking experimental findings concerns memory persistence through metamorphosis. When a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, its brain undergoes radical reorganization — in some species, near-complete liquefaction of neural tissue. Yet learned behaviors survive the transformation: a butterfly can retain conditioned responses learned during its caterpillar stage (Blackiston, Silva Casey, & Bhatt, 2008). The informational pattern persists despite the destruction and reconstruction of its physical substrate.

Levin interprets this as evidence for the substrate-independence of cognitive patterns. The "memory" is not stored in specific neurons but in a higher-order pattern — a configuration of relationships — that can be remapped onto a new physical substrate during metamorphosis (Levin, 2019).

5.2 Memetic Metamorphosis

We propose that memeplexes exhibit an analogous capacity for pattern persistence through substrate replacement. When the institutional, cultural, or social substrate of a memeplex is destroyed or rendered unviable, the memeplex's core informational patterns — its goal-structures, dependency architectures, propagation strategies, and error-correction mechanisms — can remap onto a new substrate.

Consider the following historical pattern. Many ideological systems have survived radical institutional transformation while maintaining recognizable core patterns:

• A political movement may survive the destruction of its founding party by remapping its core ideology onto successor organizations, informal networks, or cultural narratives.
• A philosophical tradition may survive the closure of its institutional centers by remapping its core concepts onto new literary forms, educational systems, or religious frameworks.
• A religious system may survive the collapse of its associated civilization by remapping its core practices and beliefs onto the cultural frameworks of its conquerors or successors.

In each case, the surface-level features change dramatically — new institutions, new leaders, new rituals, new terminology — while the deep structure (the dependency architecture, the authority model, the propagation strategy) persists. This is memetic metamorphosis: the caterpillar's institutional body is liquefied, but the butterfly retains the memory.

5.3 Formalization

We can formalize this concept as follows. Let a memeplex M be characterized by:

• Surface features S(M): specific doctrines, rituals, institutional forms, aesthetic styles, and leadership structures.
• Deep structure D(M): authority architecture (centralized vs. distributed), dependency model (guilt-based vs. knowledge-based vs. reward-based), propagation strategy (missionary vs. organic vs. coercive), and error-correction mechanism (heresy management, schism handling, apologetics).

A memeplex undergoes substrate replacement when S(M) changes dramatically — potentially beyond recognition — while D(M) remains functionally equivalent. The deep structure is the "pattern" that persists; the surface features are the "substrate" that is replaced.

This formalization generates specific predictions: when a memeplex faces existential institutional crisis, we should expect it to (a) seek new institutional substrates compatible with its deep structure, (b) modify surface features to fit the new substrate while preserving deep structure, and (c) exhibit recognizable behavioral continuity (goal-pursuit, self-preservation, error-correction) across the transition.

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6. A Taxonomy of Memeplex Architectures

6.1 Beyond Good and Evil: Structural Classification

The framework developed above is architecturally neutral — it describes how memeplexes function as cognitive agents without evaluating whether their effects on human hosts are beneficial or harmful. To address this dimension, we propose a taxonomy borrowed from ecology: the classification of symbiotic relationships.

In biology, symbionts are classified by their effects on the host:

• Mutualistic: Both symbiont and host benefit.
• Commensal: Symbiont benefits; host is unaffected.
• Parasitic: Symbiont benefits at the host's expense.

We propose an analogous classification for memeplexes, based on their structural relationship to host autonomy:

Mutualistic memeplexes enhance the host's cognitive autonomy, problem-solving capacity, and well-being. Their propagation strategy relies on hosts voluntarily spreading ideas because they find them genuinely useful. Scientific methodology, for example, is a mutualistic memeplex: it enhances the host's ability to understand reality and solve problems, and it propagates because hosts who adopt it gain competitive advantages.

Commensal memeplexes persist in hosts without significantly affecting their autonomy or well-being. Many cultural traditions — culinary practices, aesthetic preferences, linguistic conventions — fall into this category. They replicate because they are embedded in social contexts, not because they create dependency.

Parasitic memeplexes persist by reducing the host's cognitive autonomy and creating dependency. Their propagation strategy relies on (a) diagnosing a "problem" in the host that only the memeplex can solve, (b) creating emotional states (guilt, fear, shame) that bind the host to the system, and (c) suppressing the host's capacity for independent evaluation of the memeplex's claims.

6.2 Structural Markers of Parasitic Architecture

We identify the following structural features as markers of parasitic memeplex architecture. No single feature is diagnostic; the combination and intensity determine the classification.

1. Unfalsifiable core claims: The system's central propositions are structured to be immune to disconfirmation. Counter-evidence is interpreted as further confirmation (e.g., "persecution proves we are right") or as a test of faith.

1. Dependency loops: The system creates a problem (e.g., moral inadequacy) and offers the only solution (e.g., redemption), creating a cyclical dependency where the "cure" periodically reactivates awareness of the "disease."

1. Epistemic closure: The system discourages or prohibits evaluation of its claims using standards external to itself. "Faith" — belief without or against evidence — is elevated above empirical evaluation.

1. Exit costs: Leaving the system incurs severe social, emotional, or psychological penalties (loss of community, family rupture, existential terror, identity dissolution).

1. Thought-terminating mechanisms: The system provides formulaic responses that halt critical inquiry ("God works in mysterious ways," "You just need to have faith," "That's the devil talking").

1. Trans-generational installation: The system is installed in hosts before they develop the capacity for critical evaluation (childhood indoctrination), reducing the probability of later rejection.

1. Host-against-host mobilization: The system recruits hosts to suppress defection in other hosts, creating a self-policing network that reduces the system's need for centralized enforcement.

6.3 Classification Is Empirical, Not Moral

It is essential to emphasize that this taxonomy describes structural features, not moral judgments. A parasitic architecture may coexist with genuine benefits to the host (social support, meaning-making, community belonging) — just as biological parasites sometimes provide incidental benefits to their hosts. The classification refers to the structural relationship between the memeplex's propagation strategy and the host's cognitive autonomy, not to the host's subjective experience or the system's cultural value.

This structural approach allows empirical testing: if the parasitic-architecture markers correlate with specific, measurable outcomes (reduced cognitive flexibility, increased dependency, measurable mental health impacts), the taxonomy is validated. If they do not, it is falsified. This is the hallmark of a scientific framework rather than a polemical one.

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7. Testable Predictions

The framework generates the following empirically testable predictions:

7.1 Stress-Sharing Predictions

P1: Populations embedded in memeplexes with high shared-stress features (guilt, fear, apocalyptic anxiety) should exhibit greater behavioral synchronization and collective action capacity than populations in low-stress memeplexes, controlling for population size and resources.

P2: Therapeutic interventions that reduce individual guilt/fear without providing alternative community bonds should correlate with disengagement from the memeplex. Interventions that reduce guilt/fear while providing alternative community should accelerate disengagement.

P3: Memeplexes should intensify stress-signaling (e.g., apocalyptic rhetoric, moral panic) during periods of threat (declining membership, cultural competition, political marginalization). This is the memetic analogue of increased gap-junction coupling under stress.

7.2 Agency Predictions

P4: Memeplexes at Level 3 agency should exhibit means-end flexibility: achieving similar propagation outcomes through different strategies across different cultural contexts. This can be tested by comparing the propagation strategies of a single religious tradition across culturally diverse regions.

P5: The behavior of Level 3 memeplexes during existential crises should be better predicted by an agentive model (treating the memeplex as a goal-pursuing system) than by an aggregative model (treating it as the sum of individual decisions). This can be tested by comparing the predictive accuracy of the two models against historical data on religious responses to persecution, competition, and modernization.

7.3 Pattern-Persistence Predictions

P6: When a memeplex undergoes substrate replacement (radical institutional transformation), its deep structure D(M) should remain functionally equivalent across the transition, even as surface features S(M) change dramatically. This can be tested by operationalizing D(M) (authority architecture, dependency model, propagation strategy) and measuring its stability across documented institutional transitions.

P7: Memeplexes with more complex deep structures should exhibit greater capacity for substrate replacement (they have more "patterns" to remap). Simpler memeplexes should be more substrate-dependent and more vulnerable to institutional destruction.

7.4 Taxonomy Predictions

P8: Memeplexes classified as parasitic by structural markers should correlate with measurable reductions in host cognitive flexibility (e.g., performance on cognitive flexibility tasks such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) compared to matched populations embedded in mutualistic or commensal memeplexes.

P9: Hosts of parasitic memeplexes who undergo deconversion should exhibit measurable increases in cognitive flexibility, self-reported autonomy, and well-being after a transitional period — consistent with the removal of a parasitic symbiont.

P10: Memeplexes with more parasitic-architecture markers should exhibit greater collective coherence but lower individual host well-being, while mutualistic memeplexes should exhibit lower collective coherence but higher individual host well-being. This represents a fundamental tradeoff between memeplex fitness and host fitness.

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8. Objections and Limitations

8.1 The Intentional Stance vs. Real Agency

One might argue that this framework merely adopts Dennett's "intentional stance" (1987) — treating systems as if they have beliefs and goals for predictive convenience — without claiming they really do. We accept this characterization and deny that it constitutes a limitation. The intentional stance is how we attribute agency to all entities, including other humans (whose subjective states are never directly accessible). The framework does not claim that memeplexes are conscious; it claims that they are cognitive agents in the same operational sense that cell collectives, immune systems, and developmental networks are cognitive agents under TAME.

8.2 The Reification Objection

Critics may argue that we reify an abstraction — treating a pattern of human behaviors as a "thing" with its own goals. We respond that all cognitive agents are, at a lower level of description, "patterns of behavior" of their components. A human mind is a pattern of neural activity; an organ is a pattern of cellular behavior. The question is never whether the agent can be described as a pattern of its components' behavior (it always can) but whether the pattern-level description adds explanatory power over the component-level description (it does, when the pattern exhibits coordinated, goal-directed behavior that no component planned or intended).

8.3 Falsifiability

Is the framework falsifiable? Yes. If the predictions in Section 7 fail — if memeplexes classified as agentive do not exhibit means-end flexibility, if stress-sharing does not correlate with collective coherence, if parasitic-architecture markers do not predict mental health outcomes — the framework is empirically refuted. The capacity for empirical refutation distinguishes this framework from the purely metaphorical use of "meme" in popular discourse.

8.4 Limitations

Several limitations must be acknowledged:

1. Operationalization challenges: The criteria for memeplex agency (Section 3) and the structural taxonomy (Section 6) require further operationalization before they can be applied consistently across cases. We have provided conceptual definitions; measurement instruments remain to be developed.

1. Historical data limitations: Many predictions (P5, P6, P7) require comparison against historical data that may be incomplete, biased, or ambiguous. Retrospective application of the framework must be treated as hypothesis-generating, not hypothesis-confirming.

1. Cultural bias: The framework has been developed primarily with reference to Western ideological systems. Cross-cultural validation — particularly with non-Abrahamic religious systems, indigenous knowledge traditions, and non-Western political ideologies — is essential.

1. The measurement problem: Measuring "cognitive flexibility," "autonomy," and "well-being" in populations embedded in different memeplexes raises significant methodological challenges, including self-selection bias (do rigid people choose rigid memeplexes, or do rigid memeplexes produce rigid people?).

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9. Conclusion

This paper has proposed a theoretical integration of memetics and Michael Levin's TAME framework, arguing that large-scale memeplexes can constitute genuine cognitive agents under TAME's scale-free, operational definition of cognition. The integration resolves memetics' longstanding agency problem: memeplex agency is neither metaphorical nor mystical but functional, justified by the same pragmatic logic that warrants cognitive attribution to cell collectives, developmental networks, and AI systems.

We have identified stress-sharing as the mechanism by which individual human cognition is recruited into memeplex-level computation, proposed pattern persistence through substrate replacement as the mechanism by which memeplexes survive institutional destruction, and developed a structural taxonomy (parasitic, mutualistic, commensal) that generates empirically testable predictions about the relationship between memeplex architecture and host outcomes.

The framework is deliberately substrate-neutral and ideology-neutral: it applies equally to religious, political, economic, and cultural systems. It does not evaluate the truth or falsity of any particular ideology's claims but rather analyzes the structural relationship between ideological systems and the cognitive autonomy of their hosts. Whether a memeplex is classified as parasitic, mutualistic, or commensal is determined not by its content but by its architecture — not by what it says, but by how it operates.

The predictions generated by this framework invite empirical investigation across multiple disciplines — cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, computational modeling, cultural anthropology, and the history of ideas. If these predictions are borne out, memetics will have advanced from a suggestive metaphor to a rigorous, predictive science of cultural cognition. If they are falsified, the attempt will have clarified the boundary conditions under which cultural systems can and cannot be meaningfully described as cognitive agents.

Either way, the question — Do our ideas think through us? — deserves a scientific answer.

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