Dennett (1984) has described many versions of the idea of free will and argues that some of them are worth wanting. Unlike Dennett I neither think the ‘user illusion’ is benign, nor do I want any version of free will that ascribes it to a self who does not exist.
Consciousness
I have no grand theory of consciousness to offer. Indeed, the term is used in so many contradictory ways that it is hard to know what such a theory would have to accomplish. Nevertheless, I do not view the whole attempt as hopeless, as does Pinker (1998), nor as a ‘hard problem’ of quite a different order from any other scientific problem as does Chalmers (1996). I even think the theory of memetics may help.
First, by consciousness I mean subjectivity – what it’s like being me now (p. 2). This subjectivity comes about in ways we do not understand, yet we do know that it depends critically on what the brain is doing at any time. We can look at it this way – the quality of my consciousness at any time depends on what the whole brain is doing, but particularly on the way the brain’s processing resources are divided up, and the stories that are being constructed about who is doing what. In our normal state of consciousness the whole experience is dominated by the selfplex which uses words and other useful memetic constructs to weave a very fine tale. It sets everything in the context of a self who is doing things. However, when gazing in awe at the view from a mountain top, or engrossed in a creative task, the selfplex does not dominate and other states of consciousness are possible. Then there can be consciousness without self–consciousness.
Note that here my view departs from Dennett’s. For him ‘Human consciousness is
itself
a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme–effects in brains)’ (Dennett 1991, p. 210). This means that a person is conscious by virtue of having all the thinking tools that memes provide, including the ‘benign user illusion’ and all the self memes, and without them they would, presumably, cease to have ‘human consciousness’. By contrast, I suggest that the user illusion obscures and distorts consciousness. Ordinary human consciousness is indeed constrained by the selfplex, but it does not have to be. There are other ways of being conscious.
There are implications here for artificial consciousness and for animals. If ordinary human consciousness is entirely dominated by the selfplex then only systems that have a selfplex can be conscious in that way. So, since other animals do not generally imitate and cannot have memes, they cannot have the human kind of self–consciousness. This does not, however, rule out the possibility that there is something it is like to be a bat, or a rat, or even a robot.
Second, I want to emphasise that consciousness cannot
do
anything. The subjectivity, the ‘what it’s like to be me now’ is not a force, or a causal agent, that can make things happen. When Benjamin poured out his cornflakes he may have been conscious, but the consciousness played no role in making him do it. The consciousness simply arose as what it was like to be that human being, taking those decisions, and doing those actions, and with a memeplex inside saying ‘I am doing this’. Benjamin may think that if ‘he’ did not consciously make the decision then it would not happen. I say he would be wrong.
Critics of the analogy between genes and memes often argue that biological evolution is not consciously directed, whereas social evolution
is. Even proponents of memetics sometimes make the same distinction, saying for example that ‘much cultural and social variation is consciously guided in a way that genetic variation is not’ (Runciman 1998, p. 177). My colleague Nick Rose (1998) accuses these theorists of ‘self–centred selectionism’, a mistake equivalent to the idea of directed evolution in biology. The whole point about evolutionary theory is that you do not need anyone to direct it, least of all
consciously.
When human beings act, our actions have effects on memetic selection, but this is not because we were conscious. Indeed, the most mindless and least conscious of our actions can be imitated just as easily as our most conscious ones. Cultural and social variation is guided by the replicators and their environment, not by something separate from them all called consciousness.
Creativity
Tamarisk has written a science book. This suggests that she consciously authored the book, but there is another way of looking at it. Tamarisk is a gifted writer because the genes have created a brain that handles language well, and a determined individual who likes solitary work; because she was born into a society that values books and pays for them; because her education gave her the opportunity to discover how good she was at science; and because she has spent years studying and thinking until new ideas came out of the combinations of the old. When the book was completed it formed a new complex of memes: variations on old ones and new combinations created by the complicated processes inside a clever thinking brain. When asked, Tamarisk might say that she consciously and deliberately invented every word herself (though she is quite likely to say that she has no idea how she did it). I would say that the book was a combined product of the genes and memes playing out their competition in Tamarisk’s life.
This view of creativity is alien to many people. In discussions of consciousness it is common to raise the issue of creativity, as though it somehow epitomises the power of human consciousness. How could we create great music, inspiring cathedrals, moving poems, or stunning paintings unless we have consciousness? – people ask. This view of creativity betrays a commitment to a false theory of self and consciousness, or to Dennett’s Cartesian Theatre (p. 225). If you believe that you live inside your head and direct operations, then creative acts can seem especially good examples of things that ‘you’ have done. But, as we have
seen, this view of self does not hold up. There is no one inside there to do the doing – other than a bunch of memes.
I am not saying that there is no creativity. New books are written, new technologies invented, new gardens laid out, and new films produced. But the generative power behind this creativity is the competition between replicators, not a magical, out–of-nowhere power such as consciousness is often said to be. The creative achievements of human culture are the products of memetic evolution, just as the creative achievements of the biological world are the products of genetic evolution. Replicator power is the only design process we know of that can do the job, and it does it. We do not need conscious human selves messing about in there as well.
Of course selves are not irrelevant. Far from it. By virtue of their organisation and persistence, selfplexes are powerful memetic entities that affect the behaviour of the people who sustain them, and of all those who come into contact with them. But as far as creativity is concerned selves can often do more harm than good, for creative acts often come about in a state of selflessness, or loss of self–consciousness, when the self seems to be out of the way. Artists, writers and runners often say they are at their best when acting spontaneously and without self–consciousness. So selves have effects but not as the originators of conscious creativity.
Human foresight
Humans are often credited with having
real
foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the ‘blind watchmaker’ of natural selection with the real human one. ‘A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection … has no purpose in mind’ (Dawkins 1986, p. 5). I think this distinction is wrong.
There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.
As Plotkin (1993) points out, knowledge (whether in humans, animals, or plants) is a kind of adaptation. So is foresight. When a daffodil bulb
starts into growth it is predicting the summer ahead, but we know this prediction was a result of past selection. When a cat predicts which way a mouse will go and pounces at the right moment we know that the ability to behave that way was naturally selected. Both these creatures have foresight of a kind, even though their genes did not. When a person predicts what she will do tomorrow or designs a new computer we somehow think this is different. The difference may seem a large one; for there is a much cleverer brain making the predictions, and the predictions may be much more complicated and precise, such as predicting the exact time of high tide or the moment when an asteroid will hit the earth. However, this kind of foresight also comes about by selection, only in this case it is selection between memes. There is no magical conscious mind that ‘really’ has some other kind of foresight.
The ultimate rebellion
Where does this leave us with respect to Dawkins’s claim that ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. Dawkins is not alone in taking the view that there is someone or something inside us who can step out of the evolutionary process and take it over.
Csikszentmihalyi (1993) explains how memes evolve independently of the people who nurture them; how the memes of weapons, alcohol and drugs are successful while doing us no good. He describes the artist not as originator but as the medium through which artworks evolve. Yet his final message is that we must take conscious control of our lives and begin directing evolution towards a more harmonious future. ‘If you achieve control over your mind, your desires, and your actions, you are likely to increase order around you. If you let them be controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yourself.’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1993, p. 290).
In his book
Virus of the Mind,
Brodie exhorts us to ‘consciously choose your own memetic programming to better serve whatever purpose you choose, upon reflection, to have for your life.’ and 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 memes is a myth’ (1995, p. 365). So we must ask
who
gets to choose? 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 all be a product of my genetic and memetic history in a given environment, not of some separate self that can ‘have’ a life purpose and overrule the memes that make it up.
This is the power and beauty of memetics: it allows us to see how human lives, language, and creativity all come about through the same kind of replicator power as did design in the biological world. The replicators are different, but the process is the same. We once thought that biological design needed a creator, but we now know that natural selection can do all the designing on its own. Similarly, we once thought that human design required a conscious designer inside us, but we now know that memetic selection can do it on its own. We once thought that design required foresight and a plan, but we now know that natural selection can build creatures that look as though they were built to plan when in fact there was none. If we take memetics seriously there is no room for anyone or anything to jump into the evolutionary process and stop it, direct it, or do anything to it. There is just the evolutionary process of genes and memes playing itself endlessly out – and no one watching.
What then am I to do? I feel as though I have to make a choice – to decide how to live my life in the light of my scientific understanding. But how do I do that if I am nothing but a temporary conglomeration of genes, phenotype, memes, and memeplexes. If there is no choice, how am I to choose?
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 will 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 no conscious self inside then I must live that way – otherwise this is a vain and lifeless theory of human nature. But how can ‘I’ live as though I do not exist, and who would be choosing to do so?
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 any moment there is no observing self. Suppose you sit and look out of the window. Ideas will come up but these are all past- and future–oriented; so let them go, come back to the present. Just notice what is happening. The mind leaps to label objects with words, but these words take time and are not really in the present. So let them go too. With a lot of practice the world looks different; the idea of a series of events gives
way to nothing but change, and the idea of a self who is viewing the scene seems to fall away.
Another way is to pay attention to everything equally. This is an odd practice because things begin to lose their ‘thingness’ and become just changes. Also, it throws up the question of who is paying attention (Blackmore 1995). What becomes obvious, in doing this task, is that attention is always being manipulated by things outside yourself rather than controlled by you. The longer you can sit still and attend to everything, the more obvious it becomes that attention is dragged away by sounds, movements, and most of all thoughts that seem to come from nowhere. These are the memes fighting it out to grab the information–processing resources of the brain they might use for their propagation. Things that worry you, opinions that you hold, things you want to say to someone, or wish you hadn’t – these all come and grab the attention. The practice of paying equal attention to everything disarms them and makes it obvious that you never did control the attention; it controlled – and created – you.