Ideonology

A theory of significance: how much of other people's thought was shifted by a person, an event, a place or an idea. Significance here can be estimated, and it has a unit of measurement.

The only reality in which anything can mean something is other people's heads. A shift in someone else's head is an ideon; the unit of measurement is the peirce: one minute of someone else's, wholly yours. Credit flows along the chain of causes to everyone without whom the result would not have happened. Sign is a separate axis.

All the waking minutes of one person over a lifetime are one Vita. You received almost all of yours on credit. Parity is when you have returned as much into other people's heads. The typical person dies at about 0.2 Vita.

Sections

• In five minutes — the whole theory on one example: a plasma donor and his account.
• Manifesto — nine theses.
• Meaning — whether significance amounts to meaning: the possible answers, ten variants of the goal, and which one the theory takes.
• Selfhood — what in a person is their own, why it is not the same as influence, and what the schools do with it, from Nietzsche to Buddhism.
• Glossary — ideon, peirce, Vita, parity, degree, share, selfhood, coherence, the Anonymous.
• Mathematics — three axioms, four rules of transmission, one conservation law, the Shapley value, symmetry of channels.
• Examples — who leads in absolute terms, what money buys, two languages and one donor.
• Comparison — relatives in classical philosophy and fifteen schools in the language of ideons.
• Protocol — the rules of counting, fixed before the example, and one account computed by them.
• Notability — a half-joking notability criterion for Wikipedia: one Vita, channel versus share, fame versus trace.
• Hall of fame — ninety accounts from megavitas to fractions of a Vita: rescuers above prophets, the inventor of the game versus the player, famous but small; separately events, places and things, from Paris to a metro station.

The theory was first written down in the autumn of 2026 and is still being written. Sources are on GitHub.