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Are those terms substantially different from the article's claims?

THe wikipedia definition of meme is "memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions." The author discusses frames and mental models as a topic [0]. "[A] framing is a choice of boundaries" and "A model is an analogy. It is a simplified simulation of something else." These seem to map to meme-concepts ideas and beliefs respectively and loosely. ("Frame" is probably a meta-meme or ontology that expands or contracts what memes can exist at all or what can be discerned at all.)

0. https://aethermug.com/posts/a-framing-and-model-about-framin...

At its core, I believe the phenomenon of culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness, which is notoriously circular and self-referential and roughly speaking “how we do/feel things ’round here” is potentially not far from the best we can do.

Cultural baggage, for the lack of a better word, drives how we tend to approach reality (holistically or by dividing and classifying things, monistically or dualistically, materialistically or idealistically, and so on), and reality includes the very thing under discussion (consciousness, culture).

Shared cultural baggage is perhaps the thing that makes us believe another being is conscious (i.e., shares similar aspects of self-awareness). Shared culture manifests itself in an infinity of fine details of one’s behaviour; looking like a human but not behaving like a human can be a great horror movie trope, depending on how carefully shared culture is violated[0].

This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.

Most humans anywhere on the planet, though, share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to exclusion, racism, and so on (well demonstrated in both Japan and parts of the US).

[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.

I'm partial to "culture is shared expectations".

Which can, of course, be random, self-reinforcing, etc.

> > And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing.

Culture, by and large, isn't random nor arbitrary. Culture is obviously influenced by the past and the environment, but it's mostly artificially created by the elites. Once established it is self-reinforcing.

> Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.

It's not mysterious. Monkey see, monkey do. We see the higher ups do it and we mimic. Or we are told this is how we do things and we obey. This applies to nations, corporations and families.

Yeah, please leave the cultural analysis to anthropologists, sociologists, etc. The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.

I think you're missing one element. It works. The culture in Germany in 1600 compared with the culture in Germany in 2026 is very, very different, even though the geography hasn't changed. That's because in the modern world nearly none of the culture of the old Germany works.

This is not unique to Germany, of course. We long ago gave up on the four humours theory. We long ago gave up on burning women who wear pants. We long ago gave up of many things that used to be European culture.

The culture of queuing in Japan works because you are looked down upon if you don't participate and because it is better than the random stuff we do in the West. However, it would probably disappear pretty soon if it wasn't also a good solution.

Queuing culture is just baseline respect from my POV. Same with not littering, respecting shared (public) resources, etc.

Actually quite unbelievable to see it considered hilarious.

I hear the Chinese don't even have a word for it >..<

The "strong" sapir-whorf hypothesis, that cognitive and behavioral categories are limited by linguistic ones, is thoroughly discredited. At most they may influence our perceptions, but they do not constrain them.

Linguistics is one of the fields where HN consensus goes directly against the scholarly mainstream of the discipline for what I mostly find to be ideological reasons. So hopefully this isn't that and you're just a bit out of date. But there's been a big reevaluation of this in the last twenty years and virtually no contemporary working linguists represent the strong relative view anymore. It simply did not consistently produce useful results and has been abandoned.

I wouldn't call those impulses an "inner voice". I'd call them learned behaviors beaten into people, and if anything we're thankfully finally seeing less of that.

If there's anything that immediately identifies someone as inexperienced and untrustworthy it's that impulsive behavior and over-reliance on "culture" instead of their own independent mind.

this applies to digital products too. every app is a framing machine: it decides what's worth your attention and what gets filtered out. the feed algorithm is the most obvious reality tunnel, but even a todo list does it.

what's interesting is how few people notice the framing itself. you can spend years inside a particular app's reality tunnel and never question why those things are the ones you're paying attention to.

All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then. I live in Nyc for 8 years. I didn’t sit around the whole time b-ing and moaning that the city had a trash problem. I got involved in my community and active in the political movements here. When you start making issues visible and get your neighbors vocalizing the issues themselves, a lot more gets done than being in a “grumpy mood” about it indefinitely.

The real dumps are the people who complain along the way but make no effort to improve their world. Aka American culture.

“Culture” has layers: https://laureltomin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02.... Art, food, clothing, etc., are the upper, superficial layers.

But what the article is talking about are the deep layers of culture. Rooted in how mothers and fathers socialize their children from an early age.