Waking from the Meme Dream
Paper
presented at:-
The Psychology of Awakening: International Conference on Buddhism,
Science and Psychotherapy Dartington 7-10 November 1996
Susan Blackmore
Department
of Psychology
University of the West of England
Bristol BS16 2JP
Wake
up! Wake up!
Errrr, ummmm, grrrrggr, Oh yes, I'm awake now. Wow, that was
a weird dream. I really thought I had to escape from the slurb, and it mattered
terribly to get to the cupboard in time. How silly! Of course, now I see it wasn't
real at all.
Wake up! Wake up!
What do you mean, "wake up",
I'm already awake. This is real. This does matter. I can't wake up any more. Go
away!
Wake up! Wake up!
But I don't understand - From what? And how?
These
are the questions I want to tackle today. From what are we to awaken? And how?
My answers will be "From the meme dream" and "By seeing that it
is a meme dream". But it may take me some time to explain!
There is a
long history, in spiritual and religious traditions, of the idea that normal waking
life is a dream or illusion. This makes no sense to someone who looks around and
is convinced there is a real world out there and a self who perceives it. However,
there are many clues that this ordinary view is false.
Some clues come from
spontaneous mystical experiences in which people "see the light!", realise
that everything is one, and go "beyond self" to see the world "as
it really is". They feel certain that the new way of seeing is better and
truer than the old (though of course they could be mistaken!).
Other clues
come from spiritual practice. Probably the first thing that anybody discovers
when they try to meditate, or be mindful, is that their mind is constantly full
of thoughts. Typically these are not wise and wonderful thoughts, or even useful
and productive thoughts, but just endless chatter. From the truly trivial to the
emotionally entangling, they go on and on. And what's more they nearly all involve
"me". It is a short step to wondering who this suffering self is, and
why "I" can't stop the thoughts.
Finally clues come from science.
The most obvious (and scary) conclusion from modern neuroscience is that there
is simply no one inside the brain. The more we learn about the way the brain functions
the less it seems to need a central controller, a little person inside, a decider
of decisions or an experiencer of experiences. These are just fictions - part
of the story the brain tells itself about a self within (Churchland and Sejnowski,
1992; Dennett, 1991).
Some say there is no point in striving for an intellectual
understanding of spiritual matters. I disagree. It is true that intellectual understanding
is not the same as realisation, but this does not mean it is useless. In my own
tradition of practice, Zen, there is much room for intellectual struggle; for
example, in the cultivation of the "don't know mind", or in working
with koans. You can bring a question to such a state of intellectual confusion
that it can be held, poised, in all its complexity and simplicity. Like "Who
am I?", "What is this?" or (one I have struggled with) "What
drives you?".
There is also a terrible danger in refusing to be intellectual
about spiritual matters. That is, we may divorce our spiritual practice from the
science on which our whole society depends. If this society is going to have any
spiritual depths to it, they must fit happily with our growing understanding of
the workings of the brain and the nature of mind. We cannot afford to have one
world in which scientists understand the mind, and another in which special people
become enlightened.
So I make no apologies for my approach. I am going to
try to answer my questions using the best science I can find. We seem to live
in a muddle that we think matters to a self that doesn't exist. I want to find
out why.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
There is one scientific idea which, to
my mind, excels all others. It is exquisitely simple and beautiful. It explains
the origins of all life forms and all biological design. It does away with the
need for God, for a designer, for a master plan or for a purpose in life. Only
in the light of this idea does anything in biology make sense. It is, of course,
Darwin's idea of evolution by natural selection.
The implications of natural
selection are so profound that people have been awe-struck or maddened; fascinated
or outraged, since it was first proposed in The Origin of Species in 1859. This
is why Dennett (1995) calls it Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Sadly, many people have
misunderstood the idea and, even worse, have used it to defend indefensible political
doctrines which have nothing to do with Darwinism. I therefore hope you will forgive
me if I spend some time explaining it as clearly as I can.
All you need for
natural selection to get started is a replicator in an appropriate environment.
A replicator is something that copies itself, though not always perfectly. The
environment must be one in which the replicator can create numerous copies of
itself, not all of which can survive. That's it.
Can it really be that simple?
Yes. All that happens is this - in any one copying generation, not all the copies
are identical and some are better able to survive in that environment than others
are. In consequence they make more copies of themselves and so that kind of copy
becomes more numerous. Of course things then begin to get complicated. The rapidly
expanding population of copies starts to change the environment and that changes
the selective pressures. Local variations in the environment mean different kinds
of copy will do well in different places and so more complexity arises. This way
the process can produce all the kinds of organised complexity we see in the living
world - yet all it needs is this one simple, elegant, beautiful, and obvious process
- natural selection.
To make things more concrete let's imagine a primeval
soup in which a simple chemical replicator has arisen. We'll call the replicators
"Blobbies". These blobbies, by virtue of their chemical constitution,
just do make copies of themselves whenever they find the right chemicals. Now,
put them in a rich chemical swamp and they start copying, though with occasional
errors. A few million years go by and there are lots of kinds of blobbies. The
ones that need lots of swampon have used up all the supplies and are failing,
so now the sort that can use isoswampin instead, are doing better. Soon there
are several areas in which different chemicals predominate and different kinds
of blobby appear. Competition for swamp chemicals gets fierce and most copies
that are made die out. Only those that, by rare chance, turn out to have clever
new properties, go on go on to copy themselves again.
Clever properties might
include the ability to move around and find the swampon, to trap isoswampin3-7
and hang onto it, or to build a membrane around themselves. Once blobbies with
membranes appear, they will start winning out over free-floating ones and super-blobbies
are made.
Another few million years go by and tricks are discovered like taking
other blobbies inside the membrane, or joining several super-blobbies together.
Super-dooper-blobbies appear, like multi-celled animals with power supplies and
specialised parts for moving about and protecting themselves. However, these are
only food to even bigger super-dooper-blobbies. It is only a matter of time before
random variation and natural selection will create a vast living world. In the
process billions and billions of unsuccessful blobbies have been created and died,
but such a slow, blind process produces the goods. "The goods" on our
planet includes bacteria and plants, fish and frogs, duck-billed platypuses and
us.
Design appears out of nothing. There is no need for a creator or a master
plan, and no end point towards which creation is heading. Richard Dawkins (1996)
calls it "Climbing Mount Improbable". It is just a simple but inexorable
process by which unbelievably improbable things get created.
It is important
to remember that evolution has no foresight and so doesn't necessarily produce
the "best" solution. Evolution can only go on from where it is now.
That is why, among other things, we have such a daft design in our eyes, with
all the neurons going out of the front of the retina and getting in the way of
the light. Once evolution had started off on this kind of eye it was stuck with
it. There was no creator around to say "hey, start again with that one, let's
put the wires out the back". Nor was there a creator around to say "Hey,
let's make it fun for the humans". The genes simply do not care.
Understanding
the fantastic process of natural selection we can see how our human bodies came
to be the way they are. But what about our minds? Evolutionary psychology does
not easily answer my questions.
For example, why do we think all the time?
From a genetic point of view this seems extremely wasteful - and animals that
waste energy don't survive. The brain uses about 20% of the body's energy while
weighing only 2%. If we were thinking useful thoughts, or solving relevant problems
there might be some point, but mostly we don't seem to be. So why can't we just
sit down and not think?
Why do we believe in a self that does not exist? Someone
may yet explain this in evolutionary terms, but at least superficially it appears
pointless. Why construct a false idea of self, with all its mechanisms protecting
self-esteem and its fear of failure and loss, when from the biological point of
view it is the body that needs protecting. Note that if we thought of ourselves
as the entire organism there would be no problem, but we don't - rather, we seem
to believe in a separate self; something that is in charge of the body; something
that has to be protected for its own sake. I bet if I asked you "Which would
you rather lose - your body or your mind?" you wouldn't spend long deciding.
Like many other scientists I would love to find a principle as simple, as
beautiful and as elegant as natural selection that would explain the nature of
the mind.
I think there is one. It is closely related to natural selection.
Although it has been around for twenty years, it has not yet been put fully to
use. It is the theory of memes.
A Brief History of the Meme Meme
In 1976
Richard Dawkins wrote what is probably the most popular book ever on evolution
- The Selfish Gene. The book gave a catchy name to the theory that evolution proceeds
entirely for the sake of the selfish replicators. That is, evolution happens not
for the good of the species, nor for the good of the group, nor even for the individual
organism. It is all for the good of the genes. Genes that are successful spread
and those that aren't don't. The rest is all a consequence of this fact.
Of
course the main replicator he considered was the gene - a unit of information
coded in the DNA and read out in protein synthesis. However, at the very end of
the book he claimed that there is another replicator on this planet; the meme.
The meme is a unit of information (or instruction for behaviour) stored in
a brain and passed on by imitation from one brain to another. Dawkins gave as
examples; ideas, tunes, scientific theories, religious beliefs, clothes fashions,
and skills, such as new ways of making pots or building arches.
The implications
of this idea are staggering and Dawkins spelt some of them out. If memes are really
replicators then they will, inevitably, behave selfishly. That is, ones that are
good at spreading will spread and ones that are not will not. As a consequence
the world of ideas - or memosphere - will not fill up with the best, truest, most
hopeful or helpful ideas, but with the survivors. Memes are just survivors like
genes.
In the process of surviving they will, just like genes, create mutually
supportive meme groups. Remember the blobbies. In a few million years they began
to get together into groups, because the ones in groups survived better than loners.
The groups got bigger and better, and a complex ecosystem evolved. In the real
world of biology, genes have grouped together to create enormous creatures that
then mate and pass the groups on. In a similar way memes may group together in
human brains and fill the world of ideas with their products.
If this view
is correct, then the memes should be able to evolve quite independently of the
genes (apart from needing a brain). There have been many attempts to study cultural
evolution, but most of them implicitly treat ideas (or memes) as subservient to
the genes (see e.g. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Crook, 1995; Durham,1991;
Lumsden and Wilson, 1981). The power of realising that memes are replicators is
that they can be seen as working purely and simply in their own interest. Of course
to some extent memes will be successful if they are useful to their hosts, but
this is not the only way for a meme to survive - and we shall soon see some consequences
of this.
Since he first suggested the idea of memes Dawkins has discussed
the spread of such behaviours as wearing baseball caps back to front (my kids
have recently turned theirs the right way round again!), the use of special clothing
markers to identify gangs, and (most famously) the power of religions. Religions
are, according to Dawkins (1993), huge co-adapted meme-complexes; that is groups
of memes that hang around together for mutual support and thereby survive better
than lone memes could do. Other meme-complexes include cults, political systems,
alternative belief systems, and scientific theories and paradigms.
Religions
are special because they use just about every meme-trick in the book (which is
presumably why they last so long and infect so many brains). Think of it this
way. The idea of hell is initially useful because the fear of hell reinforces
socially desirable behaviour. Now add the idea that unbelievers go to hell, and
the meme and any companions are well protected. The idea of God is a natural companion
meme, assuaging fear and providing (spurious) comfort. The spread of the meme-complex
is aided by exhortations to convert others and by tricks such as the celibate
priesthood. Celibacy is a disaster for genes, but will help spread memes since
a celibate priest has more time to spend promoting his faith.
Another trick
is to value faith and suppress the doubt that leads every child to ask difficult
questions like "where is hell?" and "If God is so good why did
those people get tortured?". Note that science (and some forms of Buddhism)
do the opposite and encourage doubt.
Finally, once you've been infected with
these meme-complexes they are hard to get rid of. If you try to throw them out,
some even protect themselves with last-ditch threats of death, ex-communication,
or burning in hell-fire for eternity.
I shouldn't get carried away. The point
I want to make is that these religious memes have not survived for centuries because
they are true, because they are useful to the genes, or because they make us happy.
In fact I think they are false and are responsible for the worst miseries in human
history. No - they have survived because they are selfish memes and are good at
surviving - they need no other reason.
Once you start to think this way a
truly frightening prospect opens up. We have all become used to thinking of our
bodies as biological organisms created by evolution. Yet we still like to think
of our selves as something more. We are in charge of our bodies, we run the show,
we decide which ideas to believe in and which to reject. But do we really? If
you begin to think about selfish memes it becomes clear that our ideas are in
our heads because they are successful memes. American philosopher Dan Dennett
(1995) concludes that a "person" is a particular sort of animal infested
with memes. In other words you and I and all our friends are the products of two
blind replicators, the genes and the memes.
I find these ideas absolutely
stunning. Potentially we might be able to understand all of mental life in terms
of the competition between memes, just as we can understand all biological life
in terms of the competition between genes.
What I want to do now, finally,
is apply the ideas of memetics to the questions I asked at the beginning. What
are we waking up from and how do we do it?
Why is my head so full of thoughts?
This
question has a ridiculously easy answer once you start thinking in terms of memes.
If a meme is going to survive it needs to be safely stored in a human brain and
passed accurately on to more brains. A meme that buries itself deep in the memory
and never shows itself again will simply fizzle out. A meme that gets terribly
distorted in the memory or in transmission, will also fizzle out. One simple way
of ensuring survival is for a meme to get itself repeatedly rehearsed inside your
head.
Take two tunes. One of them is tricky to sing, and even harder to sing
silently to yourself. The other is a catchy little number that you almost can't
help humming to yourself. So you do. It goes round and round. Next time you feel
like singing aloud this tune is more likely to be picked for the singing. And
if anyone is listening they'll pick it up too. That's how it became successful,
and that's why the world is so full of awful catchy tunes and advertising jingles.
But there is another consequence. Our brains get full up with them too. These
successful memes hop from person to person, filling up their hosts' minds as they
go. In this way all our minds get fuller and fuller.
We can apply the same
logic to other kinds of meme. Ideas that go round and round in your head will
be successful. Not only will they be well remembered, but when you are next talking
to someone they will be the ideas "on your mind" and so will get passed
on. They may get to this position by being emotionally charged, exciting, easily
memorable or relevant to your current concerns. It does not matter how they do
it. The point is that memes that get themselves repeated will generally win out
over ones that don't. The obvious consequence of this fact is that your head will
soon fill up with ideas. Any attempt to clear the mind just creates spare processing
capacity for other memes to grab.
This simple logic explains why it is so
hard for us to sit down and "not think"; why the battle to subdue "our"
thoughts is doomed. In a very real sense they are not "our" thoughts
at all. They are simply the memes that happen to be successfully exploiting our
brain-ware at the moment.
This raises the tricky question of who is thinking
or not thinking. Who is to do battle with the selfish memes? In other words, who
am I?
Who am I?
I suppose you can tell by now what my answer to this one
is going to be. We are just co-adapted meme-complexes. We, our precious, mythical
"selves", are just groups of selfish memes that have come together by
and for themselves.
This is a truly startling idea and, in my experience,
the better you understand it, the more fascinating and weird it becomes. It dismantles
our ordinary way of thinking about ourselves and raises bizarre questions about
the relationship of ourselves to our ideas. To understand it we need to think
about how and why memes get together into groups at all.
Just as with blobbies
or genes, memes in groups are safer than free-floating memes. An idea that is
firmly embedded in a meme-complex is more likely to survive in the memosphere
than is an isolated idea. This may be because ideas within meme-groups get passed
on together (e.g. when someone is converted to a faith, theory or political creed),
get mutual support (e.g. if you hate the free-market economy you are likely also
to favour a generous welfare state), and they protect themselves from destruction.
If they did not, they would not last and would not be around today. The meme-complexes
we come across are all the successful ones!
Like religions, astrology is a
successful meme-complex. The idea that Leos get on well with Aquarians is unlikely
to survive on its own, but as part of astrology is easy to remember and pass on.
Astrology has obvious appeal that gets it into your brain in the first place;
it provides a nice (though spurious) explanation for human differences and a comforting
(though false) sense of predictability. It is easily expandable (you can go on
adding new ideas for ever!) and is highly resistant to being overturned by evidence.
In fact the results of hundreds of experiments show that the claims of astrology
are false but this has apparently not reduced belief in astrology one bit (Dean,
Mather and Kelly, 1996). Clearly, once you believe in astrology it is hard work
to root out all the beliefs and find alternatives. It may not be worth the effort.
Thus we all become unwitting hosts to an enormous baggage of useless and even
harmful meme-complexes.
One of those is myself.
Why do I say that the
self is a meme-complex? Because it works the same way as other meme-complexes.
As with astrology, the idea of "self" has a good reason for getting
installed in the first place. Then once it is in place, memes inside the complex
are mutually supportive, can go on being added to almost infinitely, and the whole
complex is resistant to evidence that it is false.
First the idea of self
has to get in there. Imagine a highly intelligent and social creature without
language. She will need a sense of self to predict others' behaviour (Humphrey,
1986) and to deal with ownership, deception, friendships and alliances (Crook,
1980). With this straightforward sense of self she may know that her daughter
is afraid of a high ranking female and take steps to protect her, but she does
not have the language with which to think "I believe that my daughter is
afraid ... etc.". It is with language that the memes really get going - and
with language that "I" appears. Lots of simple memes can then become
united as "my" beliefs, desires and opinions.
As an example, let's
consider the idea of sex differences in ability. As an abstract idea (or isolated
meme) this is unlikely to be a winner. But get it into the form "I believe
in the equality of the sexes" and it suddenly has the enormous weight of
"self" behind it. "I" will fight for this idea as though I
were being threatened. I might argue with friends, write opinion pieces, or go
on marches. The meme is safe inside the haven of "self" even in the
face of evidence against it. "My" ideas are protected.
Then they
start proliferating. Ideas that can get inside a self - that is, be "my"
ideas, or "my" opinions, are winners. So we all get lots of them. Before
we know it, "we" are a vast conglomerate of successful memes. Of course
there is no "I" who "has" the opinions. That is obviously
a nonsense when you think clearly about it. Yes, of course there is a body that
says "I believe in being nice to people" and a body that is (or is not)
nice to people, but there is not in addition a self who "has" the belief.
Now we have a radically new idea of who we are. We are just temporary conglomerations
of ideas, moulded together for their own protection. The analogy with our bodies
is close. Bodies are the creations of temporary gene-complexes: although each
of us is unique, the genes themselves have all come from previous creatures and
will, if we reproduce, go on into future creatures. Our minds are the creations
of temporary meme-complexes: although each of us is unique, the memes themselves
have come from previous creatures and will, if we speak and write and communicate,
go on into future creatures. That's all.
The problem is that we don't see
it this way. We believe there really is someone inside to do the believing, and
really someone who needs to be protected. This is the illusion - this is the meme-dream
from which we can wake up.
Dismantling the Meme-Dream
There are two systems
I know of that are capable of dismantling meme-complexes (though I am sure there
are others). Of course these systems are memes themselves but they are, if you
like, meme-disinfectants, meme-eating memes, or "meme-complex destroying
meme-complexes". These two are science and Zen.
Science works this way
because of its ideals of truth and seeking evidence. It doesn't always live up
to these ideals, but in principle it is capable of destroying any untruthful meme-complex
by putting it to the test, by demanding evidence, or by devising an experiment.
Zen does this too, though the methods are completely different. In Zen training
every concept is held up to scrutiny, nothing is left uninvestigated, even the
self who is doing the investigation is to be held up to the light and questioned.
"Who are you?".
After about 15 years of Zen practice, and when reading
The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, I began working with the koan "Who...?".
The experience was most interesting and I can best liken it to watching a meme
unzipping other memes. Every thought that came up in meditation was met with "Who
is thinking that?" or "Who is seeing this?" or "Who is feeling
that?" or just "Who...?". Seeing the false self as a vast meme-complex
seemed to help - for it is much easier to let go of passing memes than of a real,
solid and permanent self. It is much easier to let the meme-unzipper do its stuff
if you know that all it's doing is unzipping memes.
Another koan of mine fell
to the memes. Q. "Who drives you?" A. "The memes of course."
This isn't just an intellectual answer, but a way into seeing yourself as a temporary
passing construction. The question dissolves when both self and driver are seen
as memes.
I have had to take a long route to answer my questions but I hope
you can now understand my answers. "From what are we to awaken? From the
meme dream of course. And how?" "By seeing that it is a meme dream".
And who lets the meme-unzipper go its way? Who wakes up when the meme-dream
is all dismantled? Ah, there's a question.
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