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Susan
Blackmore is a psychologist who specialises in the problem of consciousness.
If Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme, is the meme-father, than
Susan Blackmore is the meme-mother, because she developed the concept
of memes to a science of memetics. She is a public intellectual; giving
lectures and regularly appearing in the media, discussing a wide range
of topics, from parapsychology to consciousness. She is probably the
first scientific memeticist and tries to translate the memes’ perspective
to a way of living. It is even possible to see her as a guru — not
meant derogatively — because she gives trainings and workshops on
the Giant Flip about a memetic way of seeing the world.
Memes:
the Giant Flip
Floris
van den Berg: You did make my mind flip when I read
The Meme Machine!
Susan
Blackmore: I am very pleased if writing these books can lead to
that kind of mental flip, because looking at the world through a meme’s
eye view, I think, is a better and more beautiful way of looking at
the world, which is why I like it when other people get the mental flip.
Why
is memetics not (yet) taken seriously within academia?
I think
there are lots of reasons. One is that people just don’t like the
word. It sounds childish. A more serious reason is the whole problem
of evolutionary theories in general. Biologists don’t like memes because,
as Dawkins said in The Selfish Gene,
‘in the last analysis my colleagues always want to go back to biological
advantage’, and part and parcel of his book was to open that up to
Universal Darwinism, rather than biological advantage. A lot of biologists
cannot do, or do not want to do, the leap that Dawkins suggested: advantage
to any replicator. If you accept that memes are replicators,
then adaptation can be an adaptation for the memes.
So you can see that a lot of the things we do as humans are extended
phenotype of the memes.
At the
other end, the social scientists don’t want anything evolutionary
at all. They certainly don’t want another evolutionary thing to come
along. They are fighting from the opposite direction. It takes a rather
peculiar kind of person, like the few memeticists there are, who actually
isn’t dragged into either of those directions. It takes a kind of
open attitude toward this weird new kind of replicator.
A more
serous question is: is it actually going to be useful? I think it is
just too difficult at the moment. In the end we will have to look at
the world that way. We will have to take this broad view in which ‘tamogotchis
are just the same as religions’.
Humanism
Floris
van den Berg: Are you a humanist?
Susan
Blackmore: Yes, I am a humanist. I wouldn’t have said so until recently,
because I never really thought about being a humanist. I always thought
I agreed with most humanist principles.
But
you have been a skeptic for a long time?
Yes, but
that was much more skepticism about the paranormal than about religion.
In
my view skepticism and humanism are a package.
I don’t think
they necessarily are.
Most
humanists are skeptics, but-not all skeptics are humanists.
I think that is
probably right. Anyway, I never really thought about it till last year when the
British Humanist Association invited me to give a Darwin Day Lecture in London,
which I did. After that they asked be to become a distinguished member of the
British Humanist Association. At that point, I looked into their philosophy and
moral agenda, asking myself if: ‘Am I prepared to sign up to this?’ I decided
that I was, and said: ‘Yes, I would be one’. So, now I get calls often to do
several radio and TV shows as a humanist.
I thought
you were also involved with the secular humanist movement lead by’
Paul Kurtz, the Center for Inquiry.
No, not
at all. I have known Paul Kurtz for a long time; I was on the Executive
Council of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Explanation of Claims
of the Paranormal). I didn’t know at that time that Paul Kurtz was
involved in organised humanism. He became more and more involved with
the secular humanists, so I have been at the edge of that, but never
taken any particular interest in it. I am not a joiner. I am not interested
m organisations.
That
is exactly the problem with humanists: the reluctance to organise. Of
course most scientists are implicit humanists.
Exactly!
But it is an interesting question whether it is better if you don’t
have organisations
at all. You just accept what the British Humanist Association survey
showed just last week, that most people in Britain are a kind of humanist;
we don’t need an organisation to prove it! Because once you have an
organisation, you have to decide whether you do sign up to one or the
other. And that’s a problem. And then you spend an awful lot of time,
money, and effort having meetings and setting up committees.
But what about
organising lectures, like the DarwinDay Lecture?
If you organise lectures
and you have people coming - that’s worth doing. But you don’t have
to have a big organisation, like the Center for Inquiry.
Consciousness
Floris van den Berg:
What led you to an interest in consciousness?
Susan Blackmore: I
suppose I became interested in consciousness from the beginning when
I was a student. What set me off was this long out of-the-body experience
which was quite dramatic. To say ‘It changed my life’ is almost
trivialising it. It set up a whole programme for my life: to understand
this experience. I spent 25 years or so on scurrying around in parapsychology,
thinking that I could find an explanation for that experience, finding
souls, spirits, proving telepathy or something of
that kind, all of which proved completely useless. At the
end of that I realised that there is a much more fundamental question
than that: what is experience at all? That particularly extraordinary
experience, mystical experience (whatever you like to call it) presents
a dramatic version of the question that we don’t know what experience
is. We all tend to think and speak in dualistic terms and we know dualism
can’t work, but we can’t resolve the conflict between those two.
In a way that has driven me all the way along and that’s why everything
I do, even to a small extend the memes-book, is all driven by that fundamental
question. What is this? Is this the world? Is this my experience? Is
it neither? In any moment of every day: the mystery is right there.
What could be more exciting than working on the fundamental mystery
of human existence or any existence at all?
The Delusion
of the Self
Floris
van den Berg: You say that the self is also a meme?
Susan
Blackmore: The self is a complex of memes, built up by and for
the memes.
In
the last part of The Meme Machine you try to overcome the memes,
trying not to be a slave of any of the memes, especially the self meme.
There isn’t
anybody to do that, is there? If the self is a bunch of memes, who is going to
rebel against them? So, what to do? One thing you can do is to say ‘Well, I am
going to distinguish between the self, this fictional thing, and the physical
body which is behaving and acting’. To some extent you can get around some of
the problems that way and you can say: ‘Well, this physical creature here can
stop buying into the whole story about consciousness and free will and
everything. Just drop the whole lot and simply be like any other animal,
spontaneously behaving in its environment without the delusion of self and the
delusion of consciousness. That’s where I end up in the book. I am not sure
whether that’s the right way to end up. It is a possible resolution to the
problem.
I can
see it, but the self meme doesn’t bother me.
Presumably it
runs the life of that body there; the desires and opinions and that stuff of a
Self It is how that thing lives its life. So what I am talking about is a
dramatic’ reconstruction, or deconstruction, of all of that, which is the
Buddhist, most notably Zen, enterprise, which is to completely drop the whole
story. Just not let it arise in life. That must be an extraordinary thing to do.
But
why do it?
The only reason
for doing it would be that if you say that selves cause suffering, selves are
what suffer, because if that’s true, if suffering is intimately bound up with
the self, dissolving the self will be the end of suffering.
Dissolving
the self is also destroying what life is about.
Utterly. What
most people think life is about: yes. That’s why it is such a big undertaking to
do. Philosophy:
‘Feeding on itself and going nowhere’
Floris
van den Berg: As a philosopher I wonder what you as a natural scientist
think of philosophy?
Susan
Blackmore: The philosophers that I mostly come across are the ones who
almost decamped from philosophy. Like Dennett, who sometimes says that
other philosophers say that he is not a philosopher anymore and he takes
that as a compliment. I share with all philosophers an interest in fundamental
questions that are difficult to answer scientifically, at least at the
moment, like the nature of consciousness, the mind/body problem, the
nature of truth and justice, and what it means to understand. When I
try to read conventional philosophy about these things I can’t do
it. I don’t have the training. I don’t have the expertise. But I
also wonder, as I do with postmodem deconstructionalist French waffle,
isn’t it all just tying itself in knots? Feeding on itself and going
nowhere. I think that is partly my ignorance that says that, but partly
I think that’s true. What’s exciting about philosophy now is that
neuroscience is really beginning to threaten those big questions. The
philosophers whose works I enjoy are the ones who bring a kind of intellectual
rigor to that which the neuroscientists don’t have. You have a lot
of neuroscientists who make gross philosophical blunders all the time.
There are people like Francis Crick looking for the consciousness-neuron!
That seems utter nonsense to me.
What
about the domain of normativity?
That’s
very difficult. Again, I am not trained as a philosopher and I probably
find it too difficult. What is interesting here is recent biological
and psychological work about morality and how it arises evolutionarily.
I just started reading Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds. I am interested
in how the science will begin to drive some of our attitudes.
The
End of the World
Floris
van den Berg: What is the biggest problem for humanity?
Susan
Blackmore: Overpopulation. Global warming is due to the memes: we should
understand the whole process as the memes sucking up recourses and turning
them into roads, power supplies and so on. But it is all aggravated
by overpopulation. If we had a very technologically sophisticated population
of let’s say half a billion, we would not have this problem.
What
if people would reproduce below the replacement rate?
It’s
too late! Far, far, far too late! It may be too late to do anything.
It may be that we have past some of the tipping points already and there’s
no going back. If that’s not true, we are heading for them very quickly.
We have not got another generation in which to pull back the birth rate.
We certainly haven’t got another two or three generations in which
to bring it right down. No, if the planet is going to be saved at all,
either we have to change all our lives overnight, which I don’t think
is realistic, or we just have to watch as the planet does what I think
is has to do: throw us off. In terms of the survival of the human species
the best outcome would probably be something like bird flu, which would
go through very fast and cut the population back a great deal, and maybe
by now we have had enough warning that the rest of us would reorganise
and live simpler lives and maybe we could pull through. I think that
may not happen, because we will fight against bird flu and might successfully
stop it happening. In which case we have to wait probably until starvation
kills people. If I have to be one of the people who die, I’d rather
die of bird flu than a slow starvation. But I think the other possibility,
global warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable and most people
will die of starvation.
Have
you recently come to this gloomy view
?
If you’d
have asked me five or ten years ago, I would have given the same one
word answer: overpopulation. I have always said that. I have said it
publicly. It has been obvious to me ever since I became interested in
biology that the fundamental problem is overpopulation. The latter things
I just said about how I see the future, I would only have said in the
last six months.
I do think
about the future and the future of my children, and this is one of the
reasons why I have decided to give up flying. I am going to continue
with the commitments I have already made, another half a dozen flights,
and then I am going to stop flying. Because I think I couldn’t look
my children in the face in five or ten years time, whenever it becomes
really bad, and think that I did nothing and that I just lived this
profligate life which I am living now: a lot of my life now is travelling
around the world, giving lectures, staying in expensive hotels which
waste huge amounts of food and huge amounts of water, let alone sitting
on planes. I just don’t want to keep contributing to that. So I am
going to cut down dramatically and stop in 2007. What else can I do?
All I can do is use whatever publicity I can to say that this is a serious
problem and we all should change our lives. I myself can cut a bit on
my own ecological footprint.
Recently
I read a newspaper article about a man who makes an incredibly small
ecological footprint without forsaking all the pleasures of life. He
has three bags of garbage a year! He is a vegan
- so he doesn’t need a fridge. He grows his own vegetables. He
recycles water as much as he can. And he uses rainwater for the toilet.
He claims that he is leading a pleasant life without being obsessed
by it. I admire his way of life and try to cut back on some of my things.
Good for
him. I have realised while looking at my own life style, I am not prepared
to give up everything, all at once certainly not. I make certain efforts
towards using less fuel. The house is horribly cold and I wear warm
clothes. We do a lot of recycling. I compost all the food waste in the
garden. Small things. It would be quite painful for me to cut back more,
even though I can see the point of it. But if! actually look at my life
style, those things are very small compared to the amounts of transport
costs. It’s the flying that would make the biggest difference.
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Overpopulation
has two aspects. On the one hand there is the amount of people. On the
other side there is the size of the ecological footprint.
In the West there are low birth rates, but westerners have a large ecological
footprint.
The worst
is the developing world where they are developing so fast. It was utterly
terrifying going to China a few weeks ago and watching the speed of
change: the buildings going up, the transport systems being extended.
And most terrifying of all was watching the Yangtze river fill up. We
went on a cruise on the Yangtze River and it is literally going up meters
every week and people’s homes are being destroyed by it. And this
is all to produce power to feed the growing demands of the population.
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But
they have a birth control policy?
Yes, a
dramatic control. Their birth rate is not too bad, but they have got
1.2 billion people there. All those people there now know there are
such things as cars and televisions, satellite dishes and the Internet
and computers. Internet brings more ideas and more desires.
Floris
van den Berg is a prominent Dutch
humanist philosopher and is Executive Director of the Center for Inquiry,
Low Countries. His email address is
florisvandenberg@dds.nl.
Website:
http:www.susanblackmore.co.uk
Blog:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sueblackmore/
Books by Susan Blackmore:
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