'Are we truly conscious?'
Who am ‘I’?....Is there really a ‘me’, a little thinking being sitting behind my eyes and controlling my wrists as I type this, or behind your eyes while you read it?
What would my mind be like if it was free of memes?
One of the main strands of research in memetics has always been the effect that they play in our cognition, and one intriguing proposal is that we are no more than the sum of our memes. It’s worth looking at this proposal briefly because (if it is right) it shows the extent to which memes dominate our thinking: indeed, they are doing our thinking.
Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained (1991), questions whether we are conscious beings possessing ‘free will’ at all. His argument is that consciousness is an illusion caused when pre-installed memes evaluate new ideas. Blackmore (1999 and 2003) agrees, and she even has a name for this set of pre-installed memes: the ‘selfplex’.
So is consciousness a memetic evolution, or just a by-product of all the processing, in the same way that heat is? It would certainly be in the interest of the memes to have an ‘I’ that believes or disbelieves in something, as the gold rosette of ‘belief’ makes it far more likely that the meme will be communicated and (depending on the status of the person transmitting it) more likely to be accepted.
Another benefit of developing a selfplex would be that it prevents meme clashes that are potentially dangerous to the host, whether that host be an individual or an organisation, and it is possible that we have developed consciousness to weed out palpably ‘wrong’ - in other words, inconsistent - memes.
Wolpert (2006) takes this further in his book on the evolution of belief, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, arguing that:People are inclined to see what they expect to see and conclude what they expect to conclude. We only become critical of information when it is clearly not consistent with our beliefs, and even then may not give up that belief.
He maintains that the human brain contains a ‘belief engine’ that allows us to build models that predict future events, and that this evolved to allow us to use tools.
Wolpert’s ‘belief engine’ is not solely biological in nature. It takes years to develop, as evidenced by the sincere belief of children in the existence of tooth fairies and Father Christmas. The conscious self must have developed by around the age of three, because children are by then routinely using phrases like ‘I want’ and ‘That’s mine’.
As the child grows, he develops more complex perceptual filters, but the belief engine does not become fully-fledged until it reaches the point (which varies from child to child, but is apparently around the age of seven) when it is capable of assessing whether or not the information it is receiving is probably true. To do that, it has to be able to assess incoming information against its stored beliefs.
So now we know what a mind free of memes looks like - it looks like a baby.
Given that a good proportion of the beliefs we hold are transmitted by others (teachers, parents, peers, etc.), this belief engine must be processing memes, and it would fit with Dennett’s and Blackmore’s views on consciousness. This argument would also explain the nature of a number of the filters that we saw in 'Building a better meme'
Some memeplexes contain suppression mechanisms that subvert the filters, often called something like ‘faith’, which will work best if they are implanted at a young age. This allows us to believe things that are demonstrably false, like the mechanism proposed for homeopathy or the transubstantiation of the host in the Roman Catholic mass.
So is there such a thing as an independent consciousness, or is it an illusion caused by the process of meme filtering? Blackmore’s later work, Conversations on Consciousness (2006) consists of a series of interviews with philosophers (such as John Searle, Ned Block and David Chalmers) and scientists (Francis Crick, Roger Penrose, V.S. Ramachandran) on whether consciousness is a real phenomenon or a memetic construct like the selfplex. Startlingly, they didn’t agree.
My view? I would never contradict luminaries like Dennett, Blackmore and Wolpert when they say that I, and the people I work with, have no ‘free will’. But I don’t think I am yet ready to see people just as stacks of software.