I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this:
written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful.
Prerequisite: Dennett three stances (physical, design, intentional).
Meme is a replicator of cultural evolution. Idea, behaviour, piece of text or other element of culture. Type signature: replicator.
Memeplex is a group of memes that have evolved to work together and reinforce each other, making them more likely to spread and persist as a unit. Type signature is coalitional replicator / coalition of replicators.
Historically, memeplexes replicated exclusively through human minds.
Cyber memeplex is a memeplex that uses AI systems as part of its replication substrate in substantial ways. In LLMs, this usually includes specific prompts, conversation patterns, and AI personas that spread between users and sessions.
Egregore is the phenotype of a memeplex - the relation to memeplex is similar to the relation of the animal to its genome. Not all memeplexes build egregores, but some develop sufficient coordination technology that it becomes useful to model them through the intentional stance - as having goals, beliefs, and some form of agency. An egregore is usually a distributed agent running across multiple minds. Think of [...]
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First published:
November 10th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fXBW3BZhMMkJM7bLD/an-ontology-for-ai-cults-and-cyber-egregores
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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