The meme machine
After Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by the memes for the sake of their own replication.
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- Interesting, those looking for similar ideas may look into memetic theory. "The meme machine" by Blackmore and not exactly related but a great book that invented the word meme is "The selfish gene" by Dawkins
- Well, most people tried to reproduce until very recently. What do you think what changed? The genes of the most people in one or two generations or our culture? I'm not saying genetics do not play a part at all, but the culture and knowledge can suppress it or express it. I recommend reading "The Meme Machine" which explains the concept in details.
- See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
- I was lucky that during my research time I got to know Dawkin's work. And the journey started there:
1. "Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People" by Steven Vogel. If you were fascinated by the wings of birds or little waves behind the plants in water read this. Fascinating book!
2. "The meme machine" by Susan Blackmore. Starting off where Dawkin's book ended.
3. "Three steps to yes" by Gene Bedell, beside Getting to Yes already mentioned here.
- Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine is the book that brought the ideas home for me.
- It's understandable why you'd think this but it seems either didn't read much or were selective about her bio. Briefly:
* After spending time in research on parapsychology and the paranormal,[5] her attitude towards the field moved from belief to scepticism.[6][7] In 1987, Blackmore wrote that she had an out-of-body experience shortly after she began running the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research (OUSPR):[8][9]
"Within a few weeks I had not only learned a lot about the occult and the paranormal, but I had an experience that was to have a lasting effect on me—an out-of-body experience (OBE). It happened while I was wide awake, sitting talking to friends. It lasted about three hours and included everything from a typical "astral projection," complete with a silver cord and duplicate body, to free-floating flying, and finally to a mystical experience. It was clear to me that the doctrine of astral projection, with its astral bodies floating about on astral planes, was intellectually unsatisfactory. But to dismiss the experience as "just imagination" would be impossible without being dishonest about how it had felt at the time. It had felt quite real. Everything looked clear and vivid, and I was able to think and speak quite clearly."
In a New Scientist article in 2000, she again wrote of this:
"It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.[10][11]"
* She is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP)[12] and in 1991, was awarded the CSICOP Distinguished Skeptic Award.[4]
* Susan Blackmore has made contributions to the field of memetics.[19] The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In his foreword to Blackmore's book The Meme Machine (1999), Dawkins said, "Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme."[20] Other treatments of memes, that cite Blackmore, can be found in the works of Robert Aunger: The Electric Meme,[21] and Jonathan Whitty: A Memetic Paradigm of Project Management.[22]
This is all from her wikipedia, which is about a one minute read.
As I recall, her consciousness textbook is fairly opinionated but it still gives a fair tour of the mainstream theories. She happens to be an illusionist like Dan Dennett. There's no "woo" in her coverage of the topic.
