Glossary

Terms are given in pairs so that the Russian and English versions of this site talk about the same things.

Core

Significance — the answer to "did you matter at all": the trace left in other people's heads. It is what impact measures; it has no number of its own. Not to be confused with Wikipedia's notability, which here is a threshold, I of at least one Vita: Notability.

Meaning — here only the meaning of a life: the answer to "what for". The theory does not measure it; it measures significance and leaves open whether there is meaning in it. Meaning from within, experience without a trace, is also outside the ruler. More: Meaning and its variants.

Ideon — a portion of influence: what one person shifted in someone else's head. An idea, a word, an example, a deed, a saved life. Not a unit of measurement: ideons come in different magnitudes, and the magnitude of an ideon is measured in peirces. Ideons are not counted by the piece: the formula sums minutes, not ideons, so where one ideon ends and the next begins is a matter of convenience, not of theory. A flow, not a stock: an ideon comes into being at the moment of the shift and dissipates unless it is re-emitted.

Magnitude of an ideon — the sum of the captured parts G over all the minutes the ideon passed through, before sharing and regardless of the owner. Depends on the slicing; serves as the measure of a topic on the Notability page.

Impact (I) — the total magnitude of all ideons credited to a person over all time, including after death; measured in peirces and Vitas. I = Σ M × G × share. It measures significance, not goodness: the sign is a separate axis.

Minutes (M), reach — how many minutes of other people's thought passed through your ideon. The only strictly bounded quantity: every person has exactly sixty minutes per hour, and humanity has population × sixty.

Degree (G), depth — what part of someone else's minute the ideon captured: how much the minute differs from what it would have been without you. The rest stays with the minute's previous owners. Measured as the angle between a person's behavioral trajectory with the ideon and without it: 0° means nothing changed, 90° means the person is thinking about something they otherwise never would have, 180° means a reversal, a conversion. In calculations the degree is normalized to one: G = angle / 180°.

Share — the part of what was captured that belongs to you when others were involved; the shares of all participants add up to one. Computed by irreplaceability: your share equals what would disappear if you were removed from the chain, in expectation over all plausible worlds without you. Formally, the Shapley value.

Irreplaceability — the measure of how different the outcome would be without you. A city doctor can be replaced by the one on call and gets a small share of the saved life; a village paramedic, the only one for a hundred kilometers, gets all of it.

Chain — the path of an ideon from its source through retellers, teachers, parents and actors to the head in which it took effect. Credit is distributed along the whole chain with damping.

Damping — the decline of shares along the chain. Not a rule and not a multiplier but a consequence of irreplaceability: the further back the link, the more replaceable it is. The sum of shares converges on its own, because one minute is being divided, and impact does not drain to the Big Bang. Not by distance but by irreplaceability: the reteller gets little, the author gets much. The rate of damping is set by how generously we grant that the result "would have happened anyway"; that is the theory's only value-laden parameter, and the one that hides the whole "doctor or Plato" debate.

Re-emission — passing an ideon on: retelling, writing, raising, acting. The only way for an ideon to outlive the minute in which it arose.

Axes and bookkeeping

Sign (S) — the direction of the shift, for better or for worse. A module separate from magnitude. Two ways to assign it: by intention (the account closes at death but no one can observe it) and by result (observable but never closes). The theory leaves the choice to the arbiter.

Coherence (Q), quality — a property of the emitter, not of the emission: how closely the result matches the intention. The correlation between sign-by-intention and sign-by-result. A light bulb and a laser at the same energy. The only axis with no budget and no rivalry.

Arbiter — who assigns the sign and keeps the account: God, history, automatic karma, one's own reason, nobody. Schools differ first of all in their arbiter.

Horizon — when the account closes: death, the Last Judgment, exit from samsara, never.

Incoming account — who shaped your own minutes: the life lived minus selfhood and nature. Different for everyone and always less than the life lived; for a full life, no more than one Vita. By the conservation law the sum of all incoming accounts equals the sum of all impacts: as much as everyone has given, everyone has received. The largest creditors: the Anonymous, parents, friends.

Selfhood (s) — your part in your own minute: what would have been different had another head been in your place with the same inputs. Counted by the same rule of irreplaceability as any share; neither a remainder nor free will. It does not enter impact and there is nothing to measure it with yet. One of the two routes by which the new enters the ledger; the other is nature. More: Selfhood.

Nature (n) — the part of a minute shaped by what is not human: a tree, the weather, pain, chance, a copying error. An account without an owner; traditions name it differently, and for Spinoza it is one word with God.

Units

Peirce (Ps) — the unit of impact: one minute of someone else's, wholly yours: captured in full and belonging to one source. Named after Charles Peirce, for whom the meaning of a concept equals the sum of its practical consequences.

Vita (Vt) — all the thought of one person over a lifetime: 1 Vt ≡ 2.5 × 10⁷ peirces, by definition, the way the speed of light is fixed. Convenient subunits: the microvita (µVt, 25 peirces) is one conversation; the millivita (mVt) is one deed; the Vita is one biography.

Parity — repayment of the debt: whether you have given to other heads no less than you received into your own. The working threshold is one Vita: the upper bound of the debt for a full life. Above it you are certainly a net emitter; below it, most likely an absorber: the exact debt is each person's own and smaller than a Vita. The typical person (the median) reaches about 0.2 Vt by death; the mean outgoing account equals the mean incoming one by the conservation law, and the heavy tail holds the difference.

Dynamics

R₀, reproduction number — how many new carriers of an ideon one carrier produces on average. At R₀ > 1 the chain sustains itself; at R₀ < 1 it dies out. An ideon's immortality is R₀ > 1, not a large stock.

Lindy effect — the longer an ideon has lived, the longer it has left: survival is itself selection for cheap copying, frequent occasions and attachment to institutions.

The Anonymous — the account holding all impact without a known source: language, fire, counting, norms, proverbs, jokes. Not a separate player but the sum of the accounts whose owners are unknown. The largest account in the ledger, more than half of everything. The more immortal an ideon, the more anonymous it is, because a name dissipates faster than content.

The immortals — ideons that have passed the selection threshold: the three imperishables in China (virtue, deeds, words), kleos among the Greeks, "children of the soul" in Diotima's speech.