Study how support spreads without inventing a universal mind
Human evidence; cross-species premise remains speculative. Bond and colleagues’ 2012 randomized study examined political mobilization messages delivered through Facebook. It reported effects on political expression, information seeking, and voting, including social transmission associated with close relationships. This supports a specific claim about influence in human social networks. It does not demonstrate psychic transmission, a general measure of emotion, or the spread of societal beliefs through plants and microbes.
Human evidence; cross-species premise remains speculative. This page expands the “Study how support spreads without inventing a universal mind” chapter in the storyworld collection.
Bond and colleagues’ 2012 randomized study examined political mobilization messages delivered through Facebook. It reported effects on political expression, information seeking, and voting, including social transmission associated with close relationships. This supports a specific claim about influence in human social networks. It does not demonstrate psychic transmission, a general measure of emotion, or the spread of societal beliefs through plants and microbes.
The ecological version of Likes remains a narrative lens. A human expression of enthusiasm, an animal’s observed behavior, and a plant or bacterium’s measured response require different descriptions and methods. A research program would need to define the signal, the mechanism, the endpoint, and the alternatives for each claim. Using the same word across them does not establish that they share beliefs or subjective feelings.
The practical implication is to examine incentives wherever a signal is treated as approval. A click is not consent to research. Attention is not endorsement, popularity is not a scientific replication, and silence is not agreement. Necromancer’s Bards explain those distinctions, Wizards scrutinize inference, and Rogues look for metrics that can be manipulated or mistaken for something they never measured.
Open this exact section in the Necromancer dossier. The original chapter status is “Human evidence; cross-species premise remains speculative.”
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