On 16/10/21 23:22, Jeff Zeitlin - editor at freelancetraveller.com (via
tml list) wrote:
> <snip>
>>   On further thought, and nicking liberally from Winchell Chung of Atomic
>> Rockets (who dug upand applied Mendeleev's observation that building a
>> framework allows you to look for interesting holes), that gives you 7
>> categories (with somewhat blurry lines between them) of religion - 3
>> independent binary variables (given metameme dominant or not), trivially
>> excluding the empty-dominant set.
>>
>> For a first attempt:
>>
>> {Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-dominant - named metameme
>> dominates the two others;
>>
>> {Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-deficient - named metameme is
>> dominated by the two others roughly equally;
>>
>> Co-dominant - all three metamemes roughly equally dominant;
>>
>> I have no idea how the resulting distribution will shake out, barring a
>> suspicion that a currently co-dominant religion is at an unstable
>> equlibrium.
>>
>> _I_ think you've got a solid first cut at a breakdown (am reluctant to
>> call it a partition, as it's possibly not exhaustive, and the resulting
>> subsets are explicitly not disjoint).
> Actually, I'm not sure that codominant models actually works; I suspect
> very much that true codominance represents a comparatively short-lived
> transitional form - your 'unstable equilibrium'. An interesting question to
> ask (though I don't know if it can be answered) is whether that transition
> is _guaranteed_ to move forward into new-model-dominant, or whether it can
> 'fall back' to an old-model-dominant form, whether fundamentally the same
> or fundamentally different from the pre-transition form.
>
>
>
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--
Jeff, you would be overwhelmingly surprised to find out I agree with you
- codominant phases would strongly tend to be unstable equlibria

Given you're aiming for a generic framework across _sophoncy_, IIRC, I
suspect no such guarantee can hold _in general_ - would make things
_far_ too easy.

For sake of example, maybe such a no-fallback _tendency_ has been
consistently observed among Droyne religious practices, K'kree are the
diametric opposite, Hivers do it for the lulz ("If you're not messing
with their heads, you're not doing it right"), Ithklur point and laugh
at whatever their taxi drivers do/believe, while Vargr religions are
literally the luck of the draw.

Another argument against such a general guarantee - can you make one,
either way, about the religions on _this_ ball of rock, let alone
umpteen thousand others?

That's not even getting to the interplay of sociopolitical conditions
and dynamics, both affecting and being affected by the religion(s) in
their midst.  Frinstance, how would the various strain(s) of Vegan
religious thought and practice have reacted to the scouring of Muan Issler?

Alex