Memetic Ecology and the Freedom of “Anything Goes”
Part 2: Feyerabend’s I-Tubes—A Case Study in Shifting Memetic Charge
Wandering the Wild Grammar of Knowing
I rode through the dry fields of consensus thought for too long—boots dusty, tongue parched from too much dogma and not enough water. One day, the trail forked into stranger country. Epistemic pluralism whispered from the shadows, so I followed it, like a coyote trails heat shimmer. Along that crooked path, a phrase showed its teeth: expressive plurality. Not carved in stone. More like a wind-carried ember.
That phrase didn’t ask for permission. It felt like it belonged, like it already waited there.
I stumbled on Paul Feyerabend not long after, hunkered down in his writings like a desert prophet with a broken telescope. He spoke with fire in the gut and mud on his boots—said method worship blinds, said freedom grows where rules lose grip. His kind of liberation didn’t wear a badge. It rode bareback, no reins.
The way he tangled with truth reminded me of memetic ecology—ideas don’t march in lines; they sprout like wild things. Messy. Crossbred. Ornery. That got me thinking: what if knowledge didn’t follow a chain of command but bloomed like an ecosystem? Ideas like creatures, cultures like climate, attention like soil—some rich, some stripped, all living off each other.
The metaphors came alive. They didn’t wait for theory. They walked up, sat by the fire, and told their own damn story.
And the grammar—well, it needed breaking.
Language doesn’t just name things. It sets fences. It lays rails. Most words we haul around came built for order, not emergence. So sometimes we gotta make up new ones—not to sound clever, but to survive the terrain the old ones can’t cross.
I don’t aim to tame this field. I came to ride it. And maybe leave better tracks for whoever wanders through next.
Part 1 below, or maybe this is part 1? It ain’t linear, partner. 🤠🌀
When the Old Words Fail, Let the Wild Ones Speak
Language doesn’t just carry meaning. It shapes what we see, where we step, how we breathe inside an idea. Try walking through thornbrush with city shoes—you’ll understand quick what doesn’t fit. Same thing with certain words. They came built for cathedrals, not canyons.
“It finds,” I said once, half-joking, half-listening to what moved through. The phrase stuck. Not because it sounded smart, but because it let me notice without grabbing.
Some trails come paved. Their signs hang heavy with consensus. Others wind through brush and broken fences, where the names don’t match the land. The made-up terms—the lumenes, the usurpenes, the I-Tube itself—they didn’t rise from textbooks. They flared up in the cracks where sense broke open and something else wanted in.
Paul Feyerabend rode that same jagged current. He didn’t ask for respect. He broke epistemic bones and watched how they healed crooked and stronger. Said science never ran clean—it stumbled, schemed, played favorites. He didn’t write to describe the world. He wrote to rattle the frame until something truer shook loose.
His letters carried heat. In one to Thomas Kuhn, he talked about imagination and the full flowering of human faculties—didn’t sound like your usual scholar. Sounded like a man who tasted freedom and wanted others to drink deep. Not polite dissent. A kind of joyful sabotage. He wrote to Thomas Kuhn,
“I judge the importance of a topic from the influence a specific solution of it may have upon the well-being of mankind … which derives, among other thing, from the exercise of one’s imagination, from the full development of human faculties, and from spiritual happiness.”
You don’t throw dynamite at the cathedral unless you hear something sacred growling from the rubble.
Feyerabend didn’t crown any method. He let the field breathe. Memetic ecology does the same—it trusts the mix, the competition, the quiet shapeshifting of ideas under pressure. No memeplex gets to claim the whole mountain.
That kind of freedom leaves teeth marks. It tears open I-Tubes stuck tight around old truths, lets fresh air rush in, and not all of it smells sweet.
So when the old words fail, let the wild ones speak. Not because they shine, but because they hold a shape the heart still recognizes—half-sung, half-snarled, always alive.
“Anything goes.”
Where Knowing Grows Like Wild Root Systems
Memetics never asked to dress up like formal theory. And those who tried, failed. What it did was more like a growl from the gut, or a bloom in graffiti. Dawkins may have penned the frame, but the field got claimed by kids with keyboards, prophets with memes, and elders without credentials. That’s the ecology, the philosophy, and the science of memes—all messy, plural, alive.
So don’t look for rows and columns. Look for tracks in the soil.
Memetic ecology doesn’t ask to mirror biology, though the metaphor helps when the mind feels dry. Think of ideas as critters, some quick, some burrowing. Some die with a click. Others burrow so deep they sculpt the spine. Cultures form the weather. They shape the terrain. They build the shelters or lack thereof. Attention—well, that feeds them, and every “body” fends for them as if our lives depended on them—and to a degree they do!
Attention! Oh, that sacred and scarce nutrient in the age of scrolls and dopamine loops.
The old school tried to taxonomize memes like beetles. Count them. Classify them. Trap them in jars.
“We can engineer them! We can shape culture so that people become predictable, optimized to evolve to our standards!” *Sinister laughter of [insert enemy deemed to have “power over” you, here]*
Heh… Well, this trail walks elsewhere.
It feeds on weird soil—metaphor, pattern, signal. Feyerabend stomped around this ground with reckless clarity. Took tools where he found them. Mixed myth with math. Snatched insight from chaos and named it sacred.
He showed what science forgets when it kneels before method. Ideas don’t live inside syllogisms. They fight, flirt, mutate. They echo in lullabies and propaganda alike. You don’t track them through logic alone. You feel their wake in the body, the rhythm they leave in behavior, the shape they carve in attention.
Knowledge evolves not by settling into fixed systems but by twitching toward what fits. Not what pleases the rules, but what survives the friction. Yee haw!
Some memes arrive like seeds. Others like spores. A few—like invasive vines—choke the roots unless we prune them with care.
So no, this ain’t relativism. It smells more like autonomy. Each pattern gets tested in the wild: by resonance, by pressure, by how it lives once the speaker leaves.
Ideas pass through the I-Tube not as neutral signals, but as charged flows—some bright with clarity, some thick with poison.
And still the field grows.
A Passing Thought Inhaled from the Wind
It Finds, too, that cognition itself is never sealed behind the skull. Hopefully I get this right when I say, Resonant Cognitive Architecture’s (RCA) “cognitive ecology” insists that the environment thinks through us, embedding pattern and perception in the living matrix of relationship, language, and sensory field (Griffin & de Beer, 2025). This dissolves the myth of a detached knower. Instead, knowledge emerges as co-generated ecology—an entanglement of internal architectures and external affordances.
Where Feyerabend dissolved the sovereignty of singular method, memetic ecology and RCA dissolve the sovereignty of the singular mind.
What Lives Ain’t Always What Obeys
Feyerabend didn’t whisper. He hollered from the canyon: “Anything goes.” Folks heard that and called him reckless. But he didn’t throw that line like a dare—he offered it like a compass.
He’d seen method turn into muzzle. Watched orthodoxy creep into lab coats and textbooks. So he kicked the pillars and watched what stayed standing. Not much, most days.
He meant this: ideas don’t rise because they follow rules. They catch hold because they fit the moment. Not “fit” like pass a test—“fit” like sink roots, stir breath, hold ground when everything else slides.
That principle echoes through memetic ecology. Fitness doesn’t ask, “Did it tell the truth?” It asks, “Did it stick?” “Did it carry?” “Did it settle deep enough to shape what a person notices, or trusts, or repeats in the dark?”
In Feyerabend’s terms, a method works if it feeds imagination, ignites faculties, stretches the soul. In memeform theory, a pattern thrives when it spreads, persists, and rewrites the rhythm of attention. Not just what folks believe—but how they move, what they reach for, what they reject without knowing why.
Griffin and de Beer call these forms “cultural microstructures”—memes shaped enough to install themselves. You don’t just think them. You wear them. They wrap around gesture, speech, perception (aka memeforms). That’s where fitness deepens. Not the flash in the feed. The form that carves tracks in the nervous system.
So when Feyerabend lit the match under fixed method, he didn’t torch science. He tried to wake it up.
And that’s where the danger rides in.
Because not all that spreads lifts the field. Some memes flare bright with lumenes—those insight-flashes that crack old patterns and flood the We-Sphere with light. Others carry usurpenes—force-fields of compulsion, dressed in the drag of revelation. They don’t open; they override.
“Anything goes” works like a storm. It clears old brush. It also uproots shelter if you don’t watch the wind.
Memetic autonomy doesn’t mean every pattern deserves planting. It means you notice what grows, what chokes, what lingers in the soil long after the slogan fades.
So when you see a meme ride hard through the field, ask not just what it says. Ask what it does. Ask what it leaves behind in the wake.
Then choose what to feed.
The Way His Tube Twisted
You won’t catch Feyerabend frozen in one pose. He moved. Shifted. Burned clean and muddied again. His I-Tube—membrane of meaning, filter of signal—took in the storm and flared wild under pressure.
He started straight-laced, gripped by the cool machinery of logical positivism. Thought reason could hold the reins. Thought method cut clean. His Tube filtered for coherence, for hierarchy, for order like a war map with tidy fronts.
But deep in that current, something gnawed. A parasite rode along—an early usurpene. Hid behind clarity, wore the mask of neutrality. Whispered that method didn’t carry bias, that objectivity floated above blood and history.
Berkeley cracked that frame. The Free Speech Movement throbbed like a second heartbeat around him—raw, electric, off-key. His Tube caught the charge. New We-Spheres pressed in. Collectives thick with conflict, protest, play, rupture. The Tube flexed, blinked, bled. New lumenes struck—shards of truth not delivered through reason but through living contact.
He watched method fail. Watched order turn brittle. Watched the wild knowledges outside the lab push back—and carry force. And he didn’t just theorize that shift. He lived it.
“Anything goes,” he said—not with a shrug, but with a spark. The phrase didn’t settle. It pulsed.
One part lumene—permission to break frame, to reimagine science as play, as theater, as liberation. One part usurpene—temptation to burn every frame and dance in the ash. He held both. Sometimes barely.
His Tube didn’t act like a lens. It acted like a storm door—swinging wide, rattling at the hinges, straining under winds of contradiction. Popper’s severity. Galileo’s refusal. Revolution on campus. They all passed through, left residue, rewired filtration.
That Tube never settled. It reconfigured. Again and again.
And that matters—not just as biography but as ecology. The Tube doesn’t reflect; it metabolizes. It scars. It adapts. The internalized charge of every memeform—lumene or usurpene—etches some groove in the My-Stream.
What Feyerabend lived, we all live. No Tube holds steady. Every We-Sphere leaves heat. Every insight carves shape. What matters: not how pure the pattern, but how well the Tube learns to ride the pressure. Not lock down. Not dissolve. Refract.
That kind of coherence don’t wear a badge. It hums like a horse under you. You feel it, or you lose the trail.
Feyerabend never claimed balance. He rode the chaos with eyes wide, arms loose, heart half-broken but still tuned to possibility.
Call it failure if you want. I call it movement.
Tending the Field Without Fencing the Wild
Some folks treat ideas like tools, ready to wield. Others treat them like gods, demanding worship. But out here, under the open epistemic sky, we treat them like seeds. And not every seed deserves water.
Memetic ecology doesn’t draw maps in ink. It watches where the roots take hold. Some memes sprout quick, then strangle everything nearby. Others grow slow, strange—pulling nutrients from deep memory, blooming only when the weather turns just right.
The field never asked for monoculture. But we keep trying to plant one anyway.
Religious dogma. Technocratic gospel. Clickbait algorithms that suck attention dry. All those systems want the same thing: dominance over diversity. They promise clarity. They offer order. But what they kill, more than anything, comes wrapped in surprise.
Feyerabend didn’t need a lab report to smell the danger. He knew: when one method climbs the hill and calls itself king, the rest of the ecosystem withers. The mycelial web frays. No signal travels. No anomaly takes root. Just dry patterns, echoing old victories.
His warning still echoes: progress breathes through chaos, not constraint.
That doesn’t mean we water every weed. Not every memeform earns its home. Some carry lumenes—bright insight, sharp as lightning, nourishing as rain. Others cloak their hunger. You feed them, and they rot the roots. You praise them, and they fossilize the air.
So we learn to steward, not command. We watch how a pattern moves through the nervous system. Does it open? Contract? Generate depth? Or does it hollow the soil, one repetition at a time?
Griffin and de Beer remind us: even the “maladaptive” can carry hidden logic. Some memeforms protect, even when they distort. They formed under pressure, trained by trauma, tuned for survival in brutal terrain. Calling them broken just shows you never walked where they did.
So we compost, not cancel. We feed what regenerates. We cut what devours. And when we don’t know which is which, we wait. We listen. We test the charge, not just the shape.
In this work, responsibility don’t mean control. It means kinship. It means kneeling down to feel the soil before you plant. It means choosing what you pass on with the full weight of memory in your hands.
Feyerabend rode with that kind of care. Reckless, sure—but also reverent. He didn’t demand purity. He demanded possibility.
“The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” —Feyerabend
And that demand still matters. Because a field with only one flower don’t hold long.
Where Reason Trips and Rhythm Takes Over
Logic rides clean until the terrain turns crooked.
That’s where you see it: knowing doesn’t only walk the path of reason. It sings. It snaps. Sometimes it stumbles drunk through ritual and metaphor. Feyerabend knew that rhythm. He tracked Galileo—not just as a thinker, but as a performer, a showman, a man who twisted the stars into story.
Copernicus didn’t win because his numbers cut deeper. He won because the music hit harder. The frame cracked, and a new sky poured through.
Memes don’t travel clean either. They hitch rides on fear, beauty, disgust. They don’t knock politely at the front door of belief. They crawl in through dreams, half-heard jokes, gut instincts. You feel them before you think them.
And that feeling changes matter.
Griffin and de Beer taught us: meaning lives in the body, not just the mind. A meme settles in the chest. Rewrites breath. Tints memory. Doesn’t just shift thought—it bends the spine, alters the gait, changes how a person steps into a room.
Reason might whisper a fact. But the meme that embeds shapes how the world tastes.
That doesn’t mean logic fails. Just don’t expect it to carry the whole load. Insight walks with strange companions—pattern recognition, grief, laughter, myth.
So you want to track which memes matter? Don’t ask who argued best. Ask who danced truest. Ask what lingered in the blood.
And listen for the dissonant ones—the ones that make no sense at first but hum like an old song you can’t quite place.
Feyerabend opened space for that kind of knowing. He didn’t treat reason as enemy. He treated it like an old mule: loyal, tough, but blind to the birds circling overhead.
He rode anyway.
And so do we.
Riding the Edge Without Falling Into the Void
Pluralism sounds fine around the fire. Sounds like freedom, like permission to wander. But ride far enough and you’ll feel the edge—a cliff where anything goes starts to echo too loud.
Feyerabend walked that ledge. Carried a torch, not a map. Refused to kneel to any one method. Called for wildness, not chaos. But some read his trail as a drop into relativism—no right, no wrong, just noise and fog.
He didn’t ask for that fog. He just knew no single light could chase it back alone.
Memetic ecology holds a similar stance. No memeplex owns the truth. No structure gets final word. But that don’t mean we feed every signal, treat every pattern as sacred.
We read the charge. We feel the soil.
Some memes arise in rough ground—scar-shaped, defensive, tangled. From a distance, they may look broken. Up close, they tell a survival story. What the world called disorder often formed as coherence under threat. Patterns don’t lie—they adapt.
RCA names this pattern-logic. It reminds us: cognition flows through context, not apart from it. What looks irrational from one angle may hold a quiet precision trained by pain, constraint, or ancestral memory.
So we don’t judge from the mountaintop. We listen from the field.
Ethics, in this ecology, don’t show up as rules. They grow like habits of care. Discernment don’t ask, “Is this true?” It asks: “What does this form feed?” “What charge does it carry?” “What behavior does it scaffold?”
And most of all: “What kind of world does this memeform invite?”
Not all resonance regenerates. Some repeat out of fear, not insight. Some colonize attention, hollow the self, reduce agency to reflex.
We don’t cancel such forms. We compost them.
And we hold the line—not against difference, but against domination. Not to fix meaning, but to keep the ground fertile.
Feyerabend never fenced the field. He just refused to let the first bloom claim the meadow.
That’s what this work asks: not perfection. Not purity.
Just vigilance.
And a steady hand on the reins.
Let the Pattern Speak Through You
You don’t own the signal. You carry it.
That’s what IF-Prime offers—not a rule, not a method, but a rhythm. A way of listening. A grammar that feels more like a field than a fence.
It finds. It feels. It focuses. It feeds. It fends. It forms.
Not declarations. Not commands. Just the trail as it unfolds.
In this language, knowing doesn’t rest in the “I” of the I-Tube. Instead, the “I” softens, steps aside. Lets perception stretch its legs. Lets pattern move without needing to name. Here, a meme doesn’t just persuade—it sings. It doesn’t demand—it resonates.
This grammar breaks habit. It lets you speak from the membrane, not the mask.
It finds the old memes tangled in your breath.
It feels where charge collects.
It focuses not on control, but on coherence.
It feeds what wants to grow, even when it scares you.
It fends off the parasites with clarity, not violence.
It forms memes that turn care into courage.
That grammar don’t belong to scholars or algorithms. It comes from the trail. From watching. From waiting. From letting the land teach you how to speak again.
The Long Ride Home
Feyerabend didn’t give us a doctrine. He handed us a broken compass and said: trust your steps. He knew the trail wouldn’t stay marked. That knowing must grow from within the walk, not from above it.
Memetic ecology hums the same tune. It doesn’t hand you a flag. It asks what you water. What you carry forward. What you let go when it no longer fits the rhythm.
This isn’t freedom without form. This ain’t chaos in disguise.
This way of riding calls for discipline—the kind born of attention, not rigidity. Of care, not control. RCA reminds us that willpower means little without structure, that volition rides best when the system lets it breathe.
So we build that system—not out of walls, but out of scaffolds. Rituals. Repetition. Openings.
Knowledge doesn’t trickle down. It rises like mist from the compost. From the stories buried deep. From the memeforms that changed the shape of our breath.
Regenerative epistemology doesn’t want to win. It wants to last. To feed difference. To resist monoculture not by force, but by overflow.
We don’t claim to hold the truth.
We hold the field where truth might land.
So let the Tube flex. Let the charge move. Let the memeform settle where it finds ground. And if you must ride—ride not to conquer.
Ride to tend.
My kind of Wilderness here.