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Andrew V. Jeffery
BLACKMORE’S EGO
This paper was read at the 63rd Annual Northwest Conference on Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, November, 2011.
Abstract: This paper focuses on certain paradoxes implicit in Susan Blackmore’s book, The Meme Machine. While the idea of the meme, and particularly Blackmore’s account of a “meme’s-eye view of the world” remains a philosophically intriguing re-description of reality, it is argued that even if memetics is eventually scientifically vindicated as a useful predictive hypothesis, the ontological and normative conclusions Blackmore draws from her theory are problematic.. In outline, this paper will first, briefly recapitulate Blackmore’s memetic theory of the Self, and then examine some apparent inconsistencies in her conclusions .
Introduction
When Susan Blackmore published The Meme Machine over a decade ago, her book radically challenged traditional understandings of history, culture, and of our relation, as individuals, to our cultures. In attempting to argue for memetics’ potential as a nascent science, Blackmore made at least 8 or 9 theoretically testable predictions based upon memetic assumptions;[1] yet in the following decade, memetics has failed to generate much in the way of a viable empirical research program. Some of its early advocates have, in the intervening years, backed away from the field, or at least become more qualified in their endorsements. While Richard Dawkins for instance, who coined the word “meme” back in 1976,[2] still employs the concept when talking about religion, very little of The God Delusion’s principal arguments actually rest upon memetic premises. The prospects for memetics as a fledgling science are grim. The meme-meme itself seems to have become an endangered species.
Whether memetics has been given a fair empirical trial is a legitimate question for the philosophy of science. This paper, however, will focus instead on Blackmore as amateur moral philosopher--more specifically, on certain paradoxes implicit in Blackmore’s articulation of her own vision. The idea of the meme, and particularly Blackmore’s account of a “meme’s-eye view of the world” remains a philosophically intriguing re-description of reality, resonating with ideas of philosophers as diverse as Siddhartha Gautama, Hume, and Nietzsche. However, even if the basic empirical idea was eventually to be vindicated, the conclusions Blackmore draws from it concerning the non-reality of the self, as well as the normative “morals” she draws concerning how one might best react to the truth of memetics, are problematic. In outline, this paper will first, briefly recapitulate Blackmore’s memetic theory of the Self, and then examine some apparent inconsistencies in the ontological and normative conclusions she draws.
I.
While on the standard neo-Darwinian account, all living organisms are “gene-machines”--vehicles for transmitting genes to future generations—the memetic hypothesis holds that humans are unique to the degree to which they have also evolved as vehicles for an additional kind of replicator, the meme. A meme might be defined as a recognizable unit of culturally transmitted information.[3] The idea of memetics is that when culture is broken down into these basic units of information, it will be possible to understand cultural change along broadly Darwinian lines: memes responding to selective pressures in an ultimately undirected way akin to the way natural selection operates on genes. The “meme’s-eye-view of the world” upends the normal Cartesian notion of the Self’s relation to its thoughts. Instead of ideas being produced by the mind, it is more fundamentally ideas that produce the mind. Blackmore quotes Daniel Dennett: “A human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” [4] While a careful distinction needs to be made between the mind and the self, Dennett’s account of the origins of the human mind is paralleled by Blackmore’s account of a controlling idea in the minds of nearly all human beings—the idea of the self. As Blackmore sees it, theories of the self fall into two categories, “real self” and “illusory self” theories; moreover, she is quite confident that a memetic account of the self will be an account of the latter sort:
On the one hand are what we might call ‘real self’ theories. They treat the self as a persistent entity that lasts a lifetime, is separate from the brain and from the world around, and has memories and beliefs, initiates actions, experiences the world, and makes decisions. On the other hand are what we might call ‘illusory self’ theories. They liken the self to a bundle of thoughts, sensations, and experiences tied together by a common history . . . , or a series of pearls on a string . . . On these theories, the illusion of continuity and separateness is provided by a story the brain tells, or a fantasy it weaves.
Everyday experience, ordinary speech and ‘common sense’ are all in favor of the ‘real self’, while logic and evidence (and more disciplined experience) are on the side of the ‘illusory self’. I prefer logic and evidence and therefore prefer to accept some version of the idea that the continuous, persistent and autonomous self is an illusion. I am just a story about a me who is writing a book. When the word ‘I’ appears in this book, it is a convention that both you and I understand, but it does not refer to a persistent, conscious, inner being behind the words. [5]
Note that Blackmore has constructed this dichotomy so as to saddle realism about the self with the connotation of substance dualism. But why must a real, persistent self be something “separate from the brain and from the world around,” i.e., something supernatural rather than natural? Blackmore addresses what she perceives to be the inadequacies conventional mind-brain identity theories by pointing to thought experiments that reveal our intuitive desire to see ourselves as separate from our bodies and brains; reductive neuron-centered accounts of the mind and self, in her view, fail to explain “how a pack of neurons comes to believe that is actually an independent conscious self.”[6] Seeing the mind as a “memeplex,” a group of memes cooperating to further their mutual preservation and replication, however, supplies the solution to this problem. Memes that are owned as beliefs, rather than merely being entertained as ideas, stand a better chance of occupying the brain’s “run-time,” being acted upon, and ultimately thus a better chance of being copied by others. The meme of the I, a meme that makes beliefs and other connections part of an identity, is an especially potent meme for other memes to be hooked up with. Yet while the idea of persistence over time is essential to the ‘I’-meme, the idea of substance dualism and metaphysical severability from the physical body and brain is not essential. As Blackmore notes, virtually every culture in human history has the idea of a self, but only about half of those also believe that the soul can separate from the body.[7]
II.
Blackmore does not content herself with attempting to offer a more accurate description of cultural reality—she offers her readers quite a few value judgments in connection with her assessment of the facts; indeed, The Meme Machine would have been a far less interesting book had she refrained from doing so. For her, it is not just that we have built up many false stories and theories about the self, the self itself is a false story, an “illusion” perpetrated by the memes because it happens to foster their own survival. As a no-nonsense empiricist, the untruth of this story of the “I” would be enough reason for Blackmore to dispense with it, but additionally, Blackmore sees the illusion of the self as innately harmful. While animals with no sense of self can certainly suffer, Blackmore thinks the “selfplex,” as she calls it, affords the human animal a myriad of unique, and—Blackmore thinks—superfluous, varieties of suffering. The parallels with the Buddhist annatta (“No-Self”) doctrine are explicitly cited by Blackmore, herself a Zen practitioner (although she does not consider herself to be a Buddhist), and are summarized thusly:
Now we can see the difference between Dennett’s view and the Buddhist one. Both understand the self to be some kind of story or illusion, but for Dennett it is a ‘benign user illusion’ and even a life enhancing illusion, while for the Buddhist it is the root of human suffering. Either way it is an untruth. There is no doubt that having a clear sense of identity, a positive self-image and good self-esteem are associated with psychological health, but this is all about comparing a positive sense of self with a negative one. When we ask what good is done by having a sense of self at all, the answer is not obvious.[8]
This last remark can hardly help but provoke skepticism. One should challenge Blackmore or anyone to point to even one example of a fully conscious, intelligent, and functional human animal that gets through life just fine with no sense of self whatever. Who could Blackmore point to? The Dalai Lama? Some Zen roshi? Excluding the profoundly mentally disabled, it is difficult to imagine what such a human being would even be like. Blackmore certainly doesn’t seem to fit the bill, for she has a quite definite (and insufficiently ironic) sense of who she is:
Some scientists prefer to keep their scientific ideas and their ordinary lives separate. Some can be biologists all week and go to church on Sunday, or be physicists all their life and believe they go to heaven. But I cannot divorce my science from the way I live my life. If my understanding of human nature is that there is not a conscious self inside then I must live that way – otherwise this a vain and lifeless theory of human nature.[9] [Emphases added.]
Blackmore sees the paradox here, summarizing, “But how can I live as though I do not exist, and who would be choosing to do so?”
Or does she? When she asks the question “how,” the context (especially the second part of the question, “and who would be choosing to do so?”) suggests a metaphysical question concerning internal logical consistency, as in, “How is this possible?” But when, in the next paragraph, she answers her “how” question, she treats it as a purely practical question, as in how to proceed:
One trick is to concentrate on the present moment—all the time—letting go of any thoughts that come up. This kind of ‘meme weeding’ requires a great concentration but is most interesting in its effect. If you can concentrate for a few minutes at a time, you will begin to see that in the any moment there is no observing self. . .[10]
This has the look of a non-sequitur. The question Blackmore answers is not the question she appeared to be asking; it feels as if she has changed the subject.
That being said, the basic paradox involved is a familiar one in Buddhism. If there is no real, persisting self, as the Buddhist annatta doctrine declares, who then might be following the eight-fold path? Who is meditating, who can be liberated from samsara or achieve nirvana? In the conventional sense, nobody. This logical consequence was fully grasped in “Perfection of Wisdom” texts, seminal to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. In the one of the “Perfection of Wisdom” texts, the Diamond Sutra, it states, “However many species of living beings there are . . . we must lead all these beings to the ultimate nirvana so that they can be liberated. . . .And when this infinite number of beings has become liberated, we do not, in truth, think that a single being has been liberated.”[11] John S. Koller explains this apparent self-contradiction as a paradox reflecting the fundamental insight that all conventional wisdom takes place using concepts that are themselves only signs pointing to further signified non-conceptual realities. “The finger that points to the moon is not the moon,” as an old Buddhist saying puts it. Given that insight, Koller says, “the authors of these texts faced a double challenge.”
On the one hand, they had to find ways of using conceptual knowledge to point beyond itself to reality itself. On the other hand, they had to present the understanding reached through direct realization in conceptual terms so that it could be understood and used to guide practice. . . .
One way of doing this as utilized by the authors . . . was to first state a truth conventionally, stating it in the way that an ordinary person . . . might state it. But then, in order to point out the constructed nature of conventional truth, the authors . . . proceeded to negate the reference to an independently existing reality. So what at first appears to be a self-contradiction is actually a process of deconstructing ordinary knowledge by taking away its presupposition of an independent, external referent. Then, in the third stage of the process, these authors would reconstruct the original statement without reference to any independent reality.[12]
On the most charitable reading, then, one might interpret Blackmore to have concluded that the metaphysical questions of “how” and “who” are questions based on a premise she has already rejected. They are, in the Buddha’s classic locution, “questions not conducive to edification.” Once it is grasped that all things lack self-essence, one realizes there are no metaphysical questions that can really be answered, there is only the practical question of how to respond to suffering, the existence of which is the First Noble Truth, and cannot be similarly questioned. This would be consistent with what Blackmore says throughout her book, but then she certainly could have been more explicit about it. Nothing in The Meme Machine really looks like an attempt to reformulate her statements of intentionality and moral assessment without reference to the mythical agents she regards as so harmful. Much more work would need to be done to show how such a reformulation might sound, in order to defuse other possible contradictions lurking in Blackmore’s text. Two further examples of such apparent contradictions are, first, in her criticism of Richard Brodie, and in her moral criticisms of conventional religion.
Blackmore’s dismissal of Brodie runs:
In his book Virus of the Mind, Brodie exhorts us to ‘consciously choose your own memetic programming to better serve whatever purposes you choose, upon reflection, to have for your life.’ and [sic] says of the memes ‘you get to choose whether programming yourself with them aids or hinders your life purpose’ (Brodie 1996, pp. 53, 188).
But this is all a cop out. As Dennett says ‘The “independent” mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous meme is myth’ (1995, p. 365). . . . If we take memetics seriously then the ‘me’ that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine. The choices made will the product of my genetic and memetic history in a given environment, not some self that can ‘have’ a life purpose and overrule the memes that make it up.[13]
The irony here is that this is a pretty good description of what Blackmore herself does only a page later, and for the last few pages of her book. In proposing that the selfplex can (and should) be dispensed with, Blackmore is suggesting the self is a dangerous meme we can protect ourselves from, that we can overrule the memes that make us up. In proposing meditative “meme weeding,” Blackmore herself effectively exhorts us to choose our own memetic programming. She cops out!.
Secondly, there are Blackmore’s objections to “parasitical” religious memes. Early on she says, “Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us.”[14] Later, in the chapter devoted to religions as memeplexes, she tries to give many examples of religious memes that get their hosts’ to work for them without really benefitting their hosts. But this is question-begging because she is tacitly relying on certain conceptions of human flourishing and benefit or harm that are themselves memes making up her own memetic construct, and which she is seeking to propagate; moreover, it is also inconsistent because some of the harms alleged[15], harms involving the denial of basic human capacities and autonomy to women, presuppose a conception of persons as persisting selves rather than any clear, objective criterion of harm that would apply straightforwardly to humans considered as simply biological organisms. At the end of her book, Blackmore claims that discarding the self will allow us to be truly free “not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because there is no one to rebel.”[16] Blackmore alleges that certain religious beliefs cause serious human misery, but if Blackmore were consistent, her answer to the women in question would simply be, “Get over your selves! You cannot be oppressed in these ways if there is no you.”
In conclusion, a better alternative might be to abandon Blackmore’s eliminativist ontology, seeing the self as a memetic artifact rather than as an illusion. If we evolved as vehicles for memes, perhaps what is illusory is imagining that those vehicles could be human at all without our selves.
[1] Blackmore, S. (1999). For proposed tests and predictions based on memetics, see pages 42, 58, 80, 81, 105, 129-131, 137, 141, and 211. It is her contention that memetics will explain and predict social phenomena in ways unlike other existing sociological and anthropological theories.
[2] The term was first coined by Richard Dawkins in the penultimate chapter of Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene.
[3] Such a definition side-steps many questions about the ontology and verifiability of memes. It cannot be denied that there is such a thing as culture, although the definition of ‘culture’ has also been disputed. Nor can it be denied that information is culturally transmitted, whether by direct imitation or by more complex means that still must be ultimately based on imitation.
[4] Ibid., 22. The original source is Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained, 207.
[5] Ibid., 228. In quotes of Blackmore, I have left the British quotation-marks as-is.
[6] Ibid., 221. Blackmore is possibly exploiting an ambiguity in ‘independent’ here, which she uses to refer both to free will and to the idea that the self can exist separate from the body.
[7] Ibid., 219. Blackmore cites Sheils, D. (1979) “A cross-cultural study of beliefs in out-of-the-body experiences. “ Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 49, 697-741.
[8] Ibid., 230-231.
[9] Ibid., 242.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Quoted in Koller, J. (2007) Asian Philosophies, 5th ed., 80.
[12] Ibid., 79.
[13] Blackmore, 241-242.
[14] Blackmore, 6.
[15] Ibidl., 190.
[16] Ibid., 246.
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