one puzzle of memetic science: what does it mean to say a meme is the same as another meme?
from the outside, one can make a judgement call, but it feels sort of arbitrary. but from the inside, given that memes are made in part of intelligence, you can say:
memes are the same meme if they self-recognize in each other
there's also ofc a weird case where one meme thinks it's the same as the other meme but the other meme thinks they're meaningfully different. this shows up with schisms etc.
and then rational/anti-rational memes respond differently to this recognition (or lack thereof) which in the limit can be described by these two blog posts of mine: