Mimetic Drive to False Belief

Canonical definition

The mimetic mechanism that explains the abandonment of an available decohered Referent: a positional calculation, made against a Referent the Individual possesses, that holding the false Belief benefits the Individual on Salience and positional grounds more than holding the true one. It is not a failure to access the Truth about the Referent but a decision taken in full possession of it. Where the True Belief was lost by Contactless Updating, no such decision is made at any single update; once the Referent remains available, the elimination reaches the Belief's maintenance all the same (Chapter 14, Section 14.8.3.3). The mechanism is deduced by applying the two-question diagnostic to the holder of the Belief. The A-limb is closed where the holder's appetitive floor is secure: an Individual not in appetitive precarity or deficiency is not maintaining the Belief to relieve a deficit the Belief would supply. The I-limb is closed by the valuing proper to Intrinsic Motivation, which values a Belief because the Belief is true and so motivates the seeking of Evidence, while the operation that produces a Belief, true or false, is the Thinker's content-agnostic Bayesian updating on that Evidence (Axiom 8; Chapter 4, Section 4.3.8): an Individual presented with the information that would disconfirm the Belief, and who nonetheless retains it, cannot be valuing the Belief for its Truth, so something other than truth-seeking is operative. With A and I closed, and with all the information required to form the accurate Belief available to the Individual, the only remaining explanation is positional: a calculation has been made that maintaining the false Belief benefits the Individual more than accepting the Referent would. In the typical case the Individual has determined that the True Belief confers no direct benefit on them, and has abandoned it on that ground. Referent Abandonment is accordingly the outcome, and the Mimetic Drive to False Belief is the positional calculation that produces it: this is why the maintenance of a Belief against an available, checkable Referent requires active Confabulation rather than the passive non-detection that characterises Confabulation over an absent Referent.