Memes, temes, si; free will, paranormal, no - Susan Blackmore

Susan Blackmore

At last week's Towards A Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, at which i gave a preso, was having breakfast and saw an interesting folk and sat down and talked to him.  That resulted in the previous post re Jackie Bergman, the Swedish folk deeply interested in sustainability, and our subsequent interview.  


After Jackie left, a folk sitting at a nearby table came over and asked if she could sit down.  The woman, i was to discover later was the famous Susan Blackmore.  


Susan was intensely interested in discussing my "no thoughts" state, and non-duality experiences and practices.  we went through these at some depth. Susan  had much experience and understanding of non-duality and our discussion focused on late/last stage practice.

Deepak Chopra

Susan indicated that she was to debate Deepak Chopra the next day in a Plenary Session "War of the World Views", although she knew little about him.  FYI, Time magazine wrote of Chopra "Of all the Asian gurus..., Chopra has arguably been the most successful at erasing apparent differences between East and West by packaging Eastern mystique in credible Western garb...His...pleasing and seamless model of the universe tends to jump to easy conclusions and to spackle over problematic gaps and inconsistencies in the ideas he presents...obvious to all but his most starry-eyed fans. But grousing about such crimes - as many do - does little to explain his enormous popularity."   So we discussed what i knew of Deepak, his work, presentation skills and techniques.


Susan and i met several times discussing her groundbreaking work in parapsychology, paranormal phenomena, and memes, as well as free will.  Susan wrote THE book on memes, The Meme Machine.   Memes were first defined in Richard Dawkins' landmark book, The Selfish Gene; Dawkins, a close friend of Susan's, wrote the foreword to The Meme Machine.  


The Selfish Gene laid out the idea of a "gene centered view of evolution", focusing on a gene's maximization of its "inclusive fitness", i.e. the more copies of its genes that are passed on by all beings rather than any one individual, the more successful the "selfish" gene is.  

Richard Dawkins

Evolution, in Dawkins' view, depends not on the chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission that had two other attributes, mutating and responding to selective environmental pressures.  The outgrowth of this is that the more genetically-related that individuals are, the more sense (from the genes' standpoint) it makes for them to behave selflessly with each other, which leads to altruistic behaviors. 


Memes were defined by Dawkins as a unit of human cultural evolution which was analogous, or perhaps metaphorical, to the gene, suggesting that similarly "selfish" meme behavior may guide how cultures evolve.  The term is derived from the Greek "mimema", for "something imitated".  The definition has been expanded now to "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".  


Memes carry/are cultural ideas, symbols, practices, etc. from mind to mind through any type of imitable phenomena including writing, speech, rituals, gestures, videos, etc.  Memes are like genes in that they also replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. Because we humans do not always copy or transmit memes perfectly, and we also refine, combine and modify them, many new memes, or memeplexes, are created.  


Some of these memes, like the song "Happy Birthday to You" are mostly transmitted correctly and are engaging, hence the meme is a common one.  Urban myths/stories like some woman putting her poodle in her microwave to dry it and "deceasing" it have many variants, but the meme has great persistence as it combines many common elements in an interesting, tragic/funny and understandable way.  Our words, our political systems, our religions, our languages, etc., all are memes, and they undergo significant replication, they change and they respond to "selective pressure" from the environment; if they are not "successful", they are Darwinianly pruned.  


Taking language as an example, Steven Pinker's book, The Language Instinct, points out that 80% of Native American languages are spoken largely by adults only and are therefore likely to be come extinct when those adults die.  Ninety percent of the Australian languages and perhaps as many as 50% of languages worldwide are doomed.  This Darwinian evolution of language can be accurately traced to the extent that it allows following the migratory histories of whole peoples.  


For example, the Semitic languages, the languages of the Bible and Islam, came not from the Near East but from Africa.  In Africa, the 1500 or so surviving languages fall into just five major groups; their distribution reveals which groups defeated others in the past.  Victors typically force losers to learn their language; in some cultures, language is who you are, how you are identified.  It was that way for "me" in Hungary; once i learned the Hungarian language, i "became" a Hungarian in their eyes.  


Susan has an excellent youTube video on "Memetic Evolution".


The outgrowth of this is the idea that we are merely vehicles for transporting genes and that similarly the writing, speech, rituals, etc. described above for memes are there only to transport memes.  The interesting aspect of this is to consider how we could have any such thing as "free will". If in fact the genes and memes are evolving Darwinianly, and we are just transport vehicles, what really governs our apparent behavior, our "free will" or our genes/memes?   BTW, not surprisingly, Susan emphatically does not believe in "free will".


It is useful to remember that genes and memes don't have any "free will" either, and they have no plan or purpose "in mind".  They are just replicating, replicating, etc., much like viruses with no "good" or "bad" intent.  


Susan has now introduced the concept of "temes", or techno-memes as the next step, to the "third replicator" (after genes and memes).  She has an excellent recent youTube TED video on memes and temes.

Daryl Bem

On paranormal phenomena and parapsychology, Susan explored these in depth following her graduation from Oxford.  She had an out-of-body experience which she could not explain so she began a 20 year in-depth scientific and personal exploration of such phenomena.  Following a presentation @ TSC on "Feeling the Future: Recent Experimental Evidence for the Anomalous Anticipation of Future Events" by Daryl Bem from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, the most credible and careful investigator of such things now, Susan said simply to Daryl Bem, "In all my years of research I never found anything there.  Lots of luck."   As we discussed it later, she said she could find no support for any such phenomena beyond illusions created by the brain.  The field was filled with poor science and outright fraud.