The Meme Machine (43 page)

The selfplex

Memetics provides a new way of looking at the self. The self is a vast memeplex – perhaps the most insidious and pervasive memeplex of all. I shall call it the ‘selfplex’. The selfplex permeates all our experience and all our thinking so that we are unable to see it clearly for what it is – a bunch of memes. It comes about because our brains provide the ideal machinery on which to construct it, and our society provides the selective environment in which it thrives.

As we have seen, memeplexes are groups of memes that come together for mutual advantage. The memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the group than they would on their own. Once they have got together they form a self–organising, self–protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not. In a purely informational sense a memeplex can be imagined as having a kind of boundary or filter that divides it from the outside world. We have already considered how religions, cults, and ideologies works as memeplexes; we can now consider how the selfplex works.

Imagine two memes. The first concerns some esoteric points of astrology: that the fire element in Leo indicates vitality and power, while Mars in the first house indicates an aggressive personality, and transits of Mars should be ignored unless the aspect is a conjunction. The other meme is a personal belief- ‘I believe that the fire element in Leo …’ Which meme will fare better in the competition to get into as many brains, books and television programmes as possible? The second will. A piece of information on its own may be passed on if it is relevant to a particular conversation, or useful for some purpose, but it is just as likely to be forgotten. On the other hand, people will press their beliefs and opinions on other people for no very good reason at all and, on occasion, fight very hard to convince others about them.

Take another example: 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 that boys and girls are equally good at everything’ 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 even go on marches. The meme is safe inside the haven of ‘self, even in the face of evidence against it. ‘My’ ideas are protected by the behaviour they induce.

This suggests that memes can gain an advantage by becoming associated with a person’s self concept. It does not matter how they do this – whether by raising strong emotions, by being especially compatible with memes already in place, or by providing a sense of power or attractiveness – they will fare better than other memes. These successful memes will more often be passed on, we will all come across them and so we, too, will get infected with self–enhancing memes. In this way our selfplexes are all strengthened.

Note that we do not have to agree with or like the memes we pass on, but only to engage with them in some way. Whether it’s eating pasta, watching
The Simpsons,
or listening to jazz, the memes are passed on not just in eating the food or playing the music but in statements such as ‘I like …’ ‘I hate …’ ‘I can’t stand …’ Pyper concludes that ‘Dawkins himself has become a “survival machine” for the bible, a “meme nest” for its dispersed memes which may induce readers who would otherwise leave their bibles unread to go back to the text’ (Pyper 1998, pp. 86-7). Presumably, Dawkins did not intend to encourage religious memes in this way but his powerful response to religion has had that effect. Memes that provoke no response fare poorly, while those that provoke emotional arguments can induce their carrier to pass them on. By acquiring the status of a personal belief a meme gets a big advantage. Ideas that can get inside a self – that is, become ‘my’ ideas, or ‘my’ opinions, are winners.

Then there are possessions. Some other animals, without memes, might be said to have possessions: a robin owns the territory he guards, a powerful male owns his harem of females, and a lioness owns her kill. Human possessions can serve similar functions, such as enhancing personal status and providing a genetic advantage. But we should not overlook a big difference, that our possessions seem to belong to the mythical ‘I’, not just to the body it supposedly inhabits. Think of something you own and care about, something you would be sorry to lose, and ask yourself who or what actually owns it. Is it sufficient to say that your body does? Or are you tempted to think that it is the inner conscious you who owns it? I am. I realise, with some dismay, that I am partly defined by my house and garden, my bicycle, my thousands of
books, my computer, and my favourite pictures. I am not just a living creature, but all these things as well; and they are things that would not exist without memes and would not matter without ‘me’.

An interesting consequence of all this is that beliefs, opinions, possessions and personal preferences all bolster the idea that there is a believer or owner behind them. The more you take sides, get involved, argue your case, protect your possessions, and have strong opinions, the more you strengthen the false idea that there is not only a person (body and brain) talking, but an inner self with esoteric things called beliefs. The self is a great protector of memes, and the more complex the memetic society in which a person lives, the more memes there are fighting to get inside the protection of the self.

As the number of memes we all come across increases, so there are more and more chances for memes to provoke strong reactions and get passed on again. The stakes are thereby raised, and memes must become ever more provocative to compete. The consequence is that stress levels increase as we are bombarded by memes that have successfully provoked other people. We acquire more and more knowledge, opinions, and beliefs of our own, and in the process become more and more convinced that there is a real self at the centre of it all.

There is no ‘I’ who ‘holds’ the opinions. There is a body that says ‘I believe in being nice to people’, and a body that is (or is not) nice to people. There is a brain that can store knowledge of astrology and the tendency to talk about it, but there is not
in addition
a self who ‘has’ the belief. There is a biological creature who eats yoghurt every day but there is not
in addition
a self inside who loves yoghurt. As the memosphere becomes more and more complicated, selves follow suit. To function in our society we are all expected to hold opinions on science, politics, the weather, and relationships; to hold down a job, bring up a family, read the paper, and enjoy our leisure time. With constant memetic bombardment our lives and our selves become more and more stressful and complicated. But this is a ‘Red Queen’ process. No one benefits because everyone has to keep running just to stay in the same place. I wonder just how much memetic pressure selfplexes can take before they blow apart, become unstable, or divide into fragments. The unhappiness, desperation, and psychological ill–health of many modern people may reveal just this. Today’s psychotherapy is a kind of memetic engineering, but it is not based on sound memetic principles. That is something for the future.

In conclusion, the selfplex is successful not because it is true or good or beautiful; nor because it helps our genes; nor because it makes us happy. It is successful because the memes that get inside it persuade us (those
poor overstretched physical systems) to work for their propagation. What a clever trick. That is, I suggest, why we all live our lives as a lie, and sometimes a desperately unhappy and confused lie. The memes have made us do it – because a ‘self aids their replication.

CHAPTER 18

Out of the meme race

Now we have a radically new idea of who we are. Each of us is a massive memeplex running on the physical machinery of a human body and brain – a meme machine. Crick was wrong. We are not ‘nothing but a pack of neurons’; we are a pack of memes too. And without understanding the pack of memes we can never understand ourselves.

The sociobiologists have missed a crucial point. Their achievement is to explain much of human behaviour in terms of the past selection of genes; to apply Darwin’s great theory to psychology. But in concentrating on genes alone they miss out on the importance and power of the social world. To stick to their Darwinian framework they have to treat all of culture as part of the environment of genetic selection, and so they fail to see that it has its own evolutionary processes and its own power to effect change. Without the concept of the second replicator sociobiology must always remain impoverished.

By contrast, sociologists have long realised the power of social forces. As Karl Marx (1904, p. 11) argued ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.’ Social scientists study the way that people’s lives and selves are constructed by their roles, and by the texts in which they are embedded. But they have no evolutionary theory within which to understand the processes going on. For them the biological world and the social world are explained in entirely different ways and must remain divorced. Only when we see a human being as a product of both natural and memetic selection can we bring all aspects of our lives together within one theoretical framework.

What I am saying about human nature is so easy to misunderstand that I want to spell it out very carefully.

We humans are simultaneously two kinds of thing: meme machines and selves. First, we are objectively individual creatures of flesh and blood. Our bodies and brains have been designed by natural selection acting on both genes and memes over a long period of evolution. 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. In addition, because of our skill with language and our
memetic environment, we are all repositories of vast numbers of memes, some of them simply pieces of stored information, others organised into self–protecting memeplexes. The memes themselves have come from other people and will, if we speak and write and communicate, go on into yet more people. We are the temporary conglomerations of all these replicators and their products in a given environment.

Then there is the self we think we are. Among all these memeplexes is an especially potent one based around the idea of an inner self. Each selfplex has been put together by the processes of memetic evolution acting in the relatively short period of one human lifetime. ‘I’ am the product of all the memes that have successfully got themselves inside this selfplex – whether because my genes have provided the sort of brain that is particularly conducive to them, or because they have some selective advantage over other memes in my memetic environment, or both. Each illusory self is a construct of the memetic world in which it successfully competes. Each selfplex gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in charge.

The ways we behave, the choices we make, and the things we say are all a result of this complex structure: a set of memeplexes (including the powerful selfplex) running on a biologically constructed system. The driving force behind everything that happens is replicator power. Genes fight it out to get into the next generation, and in the process biological design comes about. Memes fight it out to get passed on into another brain or book or object, and in the process cultural and mental design comes about. There is no need for any other source of design power. There is no need to call on the creative ‘power of consciousness’, for consciousness has no power. There is no need to invent the idea of free will. Free will, like the self who ‘has’ it, is an illusion. Terrifying as this thought seems, I suggest it is true.

Free will

Benjamin chose cornflakes this morning for breakfast. Why? He did so because he is a human with human tastes and the genetic make–up that inclines him towards carbohydrates in the morning, especially this morning when he was rather hungry. He lives in a rich society where cornflakes have been invented and he has enough money to buy them. He responds positively to the picture on the packet and the advertisements he sees. Memes and genes together produced this behaviour in this environment. If asked, Benjamin will say that he chose the cornflakes
because he likes them, or that he made a conscious decision to eat them today. But this explanation adds nothing. It is just a story Benjamin tells after the fact.

So does Benjamin have free will or not? The critical question to ask is who do you mean by Benjamin? If by ‘Benjamin’ you mean a body and brain, then certainly Benjamin had a choice. Human beings make decisions all the time. Like frogs, cats, and even robots, they have plans, desires, and aversions, and they act accordingly. The more memes they acquire the cleverer are the things they can do, and the larger the range of options. They can find themselves in situations in which they have many potential choices, or few, or none. Is this sufficient for what we call free will?

I think not, because at the heart of the concept of free will lies the idea that it must be Benjamin’s conscious self who made the decision. When we think of free will we imagine that T have it, not that this whole conglomeration of body and brain has it. Free will is when T consciously, freely, and deliberately decide to do something, and do it. In other words T must be the agent for it to count as free will.

But if the memetic view I have been proposing here is right, then this is nonsense, because the self that is supposed to have free will is just a story that forms part of a vast memeplex, and a false story at that. On this view, all human actions, whether conscious or not, come from complex interactions between memes, genes and all their products, in complicated environments. The self is not the initiator of actions, it does not ‘have’ consciousness, and it does not ‘do’ the deliberating. There is no truth in the idea of an inner self inside my body that controls the body and is conscious. Since this is false, so is the idea of my conscious self having free will.