I've recently picked up a book called "There Is No Antimemetics Division" which was recommended by someone random on Twitter and I think I've suffered my first idea induced panic attack in a coffee shop where I had to put the book down, and ask my wife to leave and go for a walk. My heart rate went up as existential thoughts and dread, and not in a cute "society is collapsing around us we're all in this misery together hee hee" kind of way.

There is this interesting theory that I think originated on the internet, called Roko's Basilisk. It surmises that there exists an advanced AI that creates a world where the things inside of it are to contribute to the existence of this AI, but without knowingly doing so. The mere *knowledge* about this AI is enough for you to become vulnerable to it and become instantly killed by being "forced to think thoughts the human mind is incapable of thinking." "There is no Antimemetics Division" really goes deeper on this concept and, well it's a whole story around these manifestations, things, creatures, whatever you want to call them which are "antimemetic," in that, they are present everywhere but the properties they contain allow them to be cloaked. The cloaking mechanism, however, isn't one where vision is directly impacted but rather your memory. You actually see these things, but your memory of their existence is wiped instanteously. Now, there is more to this, but that's the gist of it. One of these beings, called SCP-3125 is a being that is purported to live in the 5th dimension that is slowly making its presence in ours. It happens in the background while everyone goes on with their lives and the mere knowledge of it makes you directly visible to it and thus instanteously kill you by eating all of your memories of everything you know including bodily functions such as movement resulting in paralysis, initially, until you suffer from a heart attack and ultimately leading to death.

I put my book down half way and looked around the coffee shop and felt an immense sense of dread, almost as if the thing I was reading was exposing me to an existence of something, specifically something that is intelligent enough to spread itself through ideations, whether it be written word or a screen. Like effective viruses that we all know and love, the best ones aren't the ones that instantly kill the host but rather take a longer time to show its symptoms while being aggressively virulent, as the host continues to unknowingly spread in its environment. During COVID-19, we all collectively became familiar with the concept of r-naught that mathematicaly describes how contagious a disease is. I sat around feeling as if I were infected with something as my mind raced. Can an idea virus exist? Is it possible to read the perfect combination of thoughts and words that essentially causes the human mind to experience a denial-of-service attack? I imagine it would work in a way that spirals the mind into a sort of event horizon that you can't escape from. What's on the other side?

To me, what's more interesting, is whether the order of these specific words matters, or even the specificity of these words. In other words, does the language matter at all? Is a general concept of something enough to cause a full body shutdown in this scenario? If the combination of certain concepts is key, then that makes me think that as long as something can be translated into thought, then even numbers are enough to deliver this viral message.