I’m sharing my ontograph with you right now. Ideas we communicate are little pieces of one ontograph that a person passes to another, expanding the recipient’s ontograph.
That means our ontographs are interpermeable and overlapping. You could think of a Venn diagram where circle A is your ontograph and circle B is mine. We meet and your clothes announce to me your cultural heraldry. This expands my knowledge, and actionable knowledge expands my personal agency.
Next, you tell me about a book you just read, transmitting information from the author’s ontograph, through yours (with any alterations you include) to mine. I receive what you say through my clouded lens of imperfect perception, but perhaps I have new ideas that allow me to understand the world around me better. This increases my options for interpreting the phenomena I encounter in life.
We network our ontographs together this way–memetically. And communicating ideas that increase our adaptiveness boosts the combined agency of the human network. So far we’ve made it into space, and hopefully we’ll eventually be invulnerable to the expansion of the sun. Then the sky will no longer be the limit.