# Ontology for AI Cults and Cyborg Egregores

*TL;DR: If you already have clear concepts for memes, cyber memeplexes, egregores, the mutualism-parasitism spectrum and possession, skip.  Otherwise, read on.*  
  
I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this:  
![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/b9fdc6fe02831a5fbe3291fcc6c7faa32bce06ccf8dae36e.png)  
  
 written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful.

**Prerequisite:** Dennett three stances ([physical, design, intentional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance#Dennett's_three_levels)).

**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.

**Cyborg 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 how an ideology can seem to "want" things and "act" through its adherents.. 

The specific implementation of egregore were often subagents (relative to the human) pushing for egregore goals and synchronizing beliefs.

What's new, does not have an established name and we will need a name for it is what I would call **cyber or cyborg egregore**: an egregore implemented on some mixture of human and AI cognition. If you consider current LLMs, [their base layers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zuXo9imNKYspu9HGv/a-three-layer-model-of-llm-psychology) can often support cognition of different characters, personalities and agents: cyber egregore running partially on LLM substrate often runs on specific personas. 

Mutualism parasitism continuum
------------------------------

The term egregore has somewhat sinister vibes, can be anywhere on the [mutualist - parasitic spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_Parasitism_Continuum). On one end is a fully **mutualistic symbiont**.  The agency of the host stays or increases while gaining benefits. The interaction is positive-sum. The other end is **parasite purely negative to the host**. Everything in between exists, parasites which help the host in some way but are overall bad are common.

What makes cyber egregores unique is they can be parasitic to one substrate while mutualistic to another.   
  
In the future, we can also imagine mostly or almost purely AI-based egregores.

**Possession** refers to a state where cognition of an agent becomes hijacked by another process, and it becomes better to model the possessed system as a tool. 

One characteristic of cults is the members lose agency and become tools of the superagent, i.e. posessed.

This ontology allows clearer and more nuanced understanding of what's going on and dispels some confusions.