A Memetic Analysis of Narratives & Conspiracies - An Augmented Exploration

What makes narratives spread?

• Truth?
• Emotional resonance?
• Social belonging?
• Narrative coherence?

In issue 173 of Philosophy Now, Ignacio Gonzalez explores narratives and conspiracy theories through the lens of memetics: ideas as self-replicating cultural units competing for attention, survival, and transmission.

"Do we love the truth? Not exactly. What we truly love is the feeling of being ‘true to the truth’ - whether this feeling is justified by the facts or not."

But this time, rather than stopping at publication, we decided to try something new: Can an article serve as the starting point for an ongoing collaborative philosophical exploration - an augmented one?

Together with RationalGrid, we extended the article into a live, branching inquiry space: part discussion, part argument map, part collaborative wiki.

From the article's springboard, it evolved to explore tensions between:

• biological determinism and epistemic agency
• truth-seeking and meaning-seeking
• narrative coherence and objective reasoning
• memetic “fitness” and veracity

On June 2, at 19:30 UK, Philosophy Now, RationalGrid, and the author Ignacio Gonzalez will co-host an online discussion exploring:

• what participants discovered through collaborative exploration
• whether the grid meaningfully augmented the article
• whether AI deepens or distorts public reasoning

You’re warmly invited to join in:

• explore the grid wiki-style
• follow and extend lines of argument
• add questions, objections or supporting ideas
• discuss with other participants
• and give feedback on whether this kind of human-AI philosophical collaboration is of value

Read the article here
Co-explore via the RationalGrid here

RationalGrid is an open-source, not-for-profit AI startup. Built for serious topics, it helps to map arguments, concepts, evidence, and counterarguments in a shared visual grid. It is designed for learning, teaching, research, and public reasoning around topics where the relationships between ideas matter.