Have you ever looked at some people and wondered how much electricity they could produce if you connected them to some sort of generator? The energy that radiates from Susan Blackmore would almost certainly light up a small town, and if anybody decided to put together a ranking of the most energetic people on the planet, she would doubtlessly make the list. She continually gifts this energy to the people surrounding her, and it seems fair to say she’s got a tremendous surplus of it when considering that, alongside her exceptionally active professional life, she also plays in a samba band, and enjoys power lifting, painting, kayaking and gardening.
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 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. (Blackmore 1987)
This experience inspired her to engage in an intensive search for the essence of paranormal phenomena. After spending time in research on parapsychology and the paranormal, her attitude toward the field moved from belief to skepticism. This adventure in Susan’s life lasted around 30 years.
When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.
From the memetic point of view, the self is a memeplex that does not serve us in making decisions, but exclusively to disseminate the memes that comprise it.
Susan Blackmore considers herself as one of those scientists who are incapable of separating their scientific views from life. She cannot understand the attitude of biologists who practice their science during the week and then head for church on the weekends, or physicists who believe they will enter heaven after death. This is also why she actively seeks means of protecting herself from the tyranny of memes. The defense she has practiced for decades is Zen meditation—the cleansing of thoughts and concentration on the “here and now,” a life without the false feeling of self.
She is an unusual scientist, because at a certain moment in her career she abandoned a safe job at a university in order to strike out on her own. Some of her coworkers at the time considered this a moment of insanity, while others were sincerely jealous. She never returned to academia, yet despite that fact she consistently features in rankings of the most outstanding living psychologists.
Professor Blackmore, among well-known scholar-psychologists, you are probably the only one who quit working at a university in order to follow your own freelance path. Was this decision a manifestation of dissent directed against the norms and relations prevailing in academia?
If you mean back in the 1970s, then I never thought of myself as having a career at all. I didn’t look to the future, but rather I only wanted to pursue my obsessions with trying to understand the mind. Initially I just wanted to prove to the world that psychic powers such as telepathy and clairvoyance existed. When I found out that it almost certainly does not, I moved on to a deep bewilderment about the nature of consciousness. I then worked on my own for many years, raising my children, and doing writing and research when I could. Later, after ten years of an actual university job, I gave it up to return to being freelance. This time, when I gave up my job, it was to some extent about academia and the increasing workload, the growing number of less-able students, and the pointlessness of red tape and meetings. I felt like I was being paid not to work! I prefer the freedom to work on my own as much as I want, and I’m happy to cope with less pay and more uncertainty in exchange.
I can imagine that choosing this difficult and perhaps somewhat romantic career path could lead to some negative consequences. Which of them have you found to be the most burdensome?
First of all, I never thought of it as a career, so in a way I’m rejecting the premise of your question. But did my choices have negative consequences? Well, yes. For a lot of my earlier life, when my kids were small, I didn’t have a job. I didn’t expect myself to be able to get a job because of the work I was doing on telepathy, clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences. I got tiny little research grants, and my husband had a lectureship, which I was sort of jealous of, but sort of not. We had very little money, and I was at home bringing up the kids most of the time, trying to write my books in whatever little time I had with two young kids. I suppose that was the most negative aspect of it. Otherwise, I don’t find anything negative in it. Of course, I got a lot of flak from believers. Interestingly, when I was a believer I never experienced any nastiness from the skeptics, but when I became a skeptic I got lots of nastiness from the believers. It’s the believers in the paranormal and life after death who are really vicious in the hate mail and everything. Sad, isn’t it?
Yes, that’s true. But your position in the scientific community is very strong, your name appears in rankings of the most outstanding psychologists. What do you think—would someone less recognizable be able to enjoy a similar career as an independent thinker in the modern world? Is it conducive for people who want to work independently?
I don’t know. I think it has always been difficult, and it still is now. One thing you might find odd is that it’s easier for a woman to do it if you are the kind of woman who wants to have children and stay at home and look after those children. You’re forced to find a way to combine your work with your home life, and I was always very happy to do that. Also, when the kids were young, I was living in a village where most of the women were at home all the time. They weren’t writing books, but it was quite normal for women to be supported by their husbands. Nowadays it’s much easier for women to get a job than it was in my time, but it’s kind of harder in a way, because that’s expected of them and it’s not so easy to limp by on very little money and use your husband’s income. That said, I don’t know why my name comes up in those rankings, because I haven’t done any fantastic psychological work. I’ve done quite a lot on consciousness and written a textbook, but I don’t have any great theory of consciousness that solves any problems. All my work on the paranormal ended up showing that there were no phenomena and providing alternative explanations. I think one of the reasons I became well known is that in my parapsychology days, radio and TV were all there was. There was no social media or internet, and maybe I just had the kind of voice, or presence or enthusiasm—whatever it is—that they needed. There were always programs looking for a skeptic for “balance.” So I went on programs with a hundred people who’d seen a ghost and Sue Blackmore to say it was all in their mind, or 500 people in the studio who had been to heaven and come back and Sue Blackmore to say it’s all brain mechanisms and hallucinations. I did that, what I call “rent-a-skeptic” for many years, and while I earned a little bit of money that way, I certainly earned a lot of recognition. If you think of the important psychologists on those lists, you can probably say for nearly all of them: „yeah, that’s the person who discovered X, or this person created a transformative theory,” but I don’t think you can really say that about me.
You’re simply being modest.
I try to understand because I think it’s odd.
Do young people have opportunities to fulfill their ambitions in a similar manner?
Well, there are always opportunities. If you become obsessed by something, then you’ll do it, whether it’s today or decades ago like me. You will find a way because you care so much—you might be a philosopher obsessed with understanding the mind-body problem or whatever it might be, and you want to know. Or you might be a biologist so disturbed by climate change and mass extinction that nothing else matters in your life. If nothing else matters in your life, you will find a way, and there will always be people who do that. Of course, now in order to be heard you need to be out there on the internet, which takes a lot of time and effort. I don’t do Twitter, Instagram or anything like that, only a rather simple Facebook page, and my own website that I started back in the 90s and still maintain now. It’s a vast thing and I’m happy to do that. Nowadays you have to go in really hard if you want your work to be seen. But again, if you’re really obsessional about something, you just get on with it. If you’re lucky and your ideas are good enough then you’ll flourish, and if they’re not you won’t. I don’t think that’s changed even though the world has changed.
Should contemporary societies provide conditions for young, individualistic intellectuals different than those at today’s universities?
I think they are there if you want to find them. My knowledge is more about science than the humanities and other subjects, but you’re not going to get anywhere with any of this thinking if you don’t go to university in the first place. You must have some basic training in whatever your subject is, whether it’s theoretical physics or biology or whatever else it might be—you have to start there, and then there are lots of ways to branch out. I don’t know what it would mean for a society to provide other ways. I’m trying to think of a better word than the “crazy people,” but people like me just have an obsession we want to go off and understand. We’ll find a way in any society. I don’t know what you could provide. It’s not like a business where you can provide startup money or places to work or something like that. If your subject requires a lab, you’ve got to be somewhere that has a lab, whether that’s a university or a private institution or a corporation. You need the equipment and you need the money to do that. If you’re a philosopher, or a psychologist like myself not in the lab, just thinking and reading and so on, then you just need a house to live in and you can get on with it yourself. I’m not sure how to answer that question. What sort of things do you think society could provide for such people?
I don’t mean any specific expectations. I just wonder what you think about it.
Well, it’s a very interesting and difficult question. But I hope we are still living in a world in which good ideas flourish. And I get really depressed because such a load of absolute crap flourishes, and we have Donald Trump coming to England today. Oh, God… And we have so much fake news, and we have Gwyneth Paltrow and her wretched false claims about health, which ought to be illegal and yet she gets away with it. I can get depressed about that. Nevertheless, if you think deeply about problems in math, physics, biology or psychology and come up with really good ideas, you’ll find a way. Those ideas will get out, they’ll escape. That’s my hope, that it was always true and remains true today.
We began this conversation somewhat unusually, for the simple reason that, in my view, your individual career path and choices serve to highlight the problems that many contemporary thinkers are faced with. Now I’d like to discuss the things which you have taken up in your life and work. As you mentioned before, you devoted 30 years to researching paranormal energy, only to abandon the field forever. What led you to walk away from it?
I tried to walk away a long time before I finally managed it. I began pursuing my Ph.D. in 1975, and I’d already done some experiments before that. So I began serious experiments then. By 1980, I had come to the conclusion that there were no paranormal phenomena. I wouldn’t say a hundred percent, though. They may exist and I just couldn’t find them, but I’m as sure as I can be that there are no such paranormal phenomena. So I’d already become very skeptical by then. I kept going because the claims kept coming, and because I knew a lot about the experimental methodology and the statistical methods used in that field. I felt I could contribute, and then people kept asking me what I thought about all sorts of experiments, so I’d get lured back into it. I tried to walk away several times, and it really wasn’t until the year 2000 when I simultaneously left my job and the field of parapsychology in order to write my big textbook on consciousness. I just wanted to get away. Many people would have loved my full-time job as Reader at the University of the West of England, but I gradually cut down to two days a week and then left altogether. I have always been happiest being at home, being able to work all the time with no one to deal with at all, just reading, working and writing alone, and I had I had the determination to write. Around 1999, the Internet appeared and I started my website. I also used to write for The Guardian and The Independent. So I wrote that I was leaving, and one article “Why I’m leaving” became very popular. At the same time I finally escaped from parapsychology. Since then, if people ask me questions about particular psi experiments, I say that I can give an informed opinion on anything from way back in the 80s, but about recent stuff I cannot. This is because the process of trying to explain someone else’s results and find out what went wrong in some experiment—if anything did go wrong—is often harder work than doing the experiments in the first place. It’s also terribly depressing. And I just couldn’t bear it anymore. So it took me about 20 years to escape.
Considering your familiarity with researchers studying paranormal phenomena, would you say that many have arrived at conclusions similar to yours—that such phenomena do not exist—but differently from yourself, they aren’t strong enough to walk away from a lifetime’s worth of work?
It’s an interesting question. There are lots of different things going on there. First of all, when I was involved in parapsychology I knew many good, bright researchers who came to that conclusion and just left. They might have been in the field for a few years, done some research, came to the same conclusion I did, and went off and did something else. Julie Milton was very good researcher and she has done some more parapsychology, but she went off and got a career elsewhere. And Debbie Weiner was another American who left to do other things. There are others who couldn’t make up their mind, but on the whole the human mind does tend to go one way or the other on big issues like this and I would say the vast majority of people in parapsychology know a lot of the criticisms. They don’t accept them. They have such a strong belief in paranormal phenomena they believe to have experienced themselves that they are simply able to dismiss criticisms from people like me. There are a very few who are so determined to be right about the existence of paranormal phenomena that they will actually cheat in their experiments. Not many, but unfortunately even a very few can cause enormous damage to a field and that, sadly, has happened.
I’ve read and heard on several occasions that despite abandoning parapsychology, you continue to believe that we should support research on paranormal phenomena. For many skeptics this is a very surprising attitude. Could you elaborate on your views?
Yes, if you discover that some theory in physics or chemistry is wrong, then it just gets forgotten. You don’t have to suppress it, people won’t give money to it, and it goes away. Claims of the paranormal are somewhat different because so many people have experiences that they are absolutely convinced were psychic. It can be the simplest thing that happens to all of us—you think of a friend, and 10 minutes later they ring you up, and you think “oh isn’t that strange?” Or you wake up after a really vivid dream of somebody, and you discover that they died the day before and you didn’t know about it. The statistics have been done and that’s bound to happen to quite a lot of people just by chance. Without going deep into the weeds, people have these experiences, which we know from some of the surveys I did a long time ago. We know that the major driver of people’s belief in the paranormal is their own experiences, and it doesn’t help to say “well, that’s just a coincidence. You know, that’s probability.” We all are very bad at understanding probability, and it doesn’t wash with people to say that. So it behooves us to provide some kind of explanation for people’s experiences. That’s why I have gone away from testing paranormal phenomena to looking into why people have out-of-body experiences and other kinds of odd things that happen to them, because that can help them abandon belief in the paranormal when they understand how and why tunnel experiences and ghosts under the bed occur. All these things which we now understand very well can help a lot of people in letting go of those false explanations. But it is still conceivable that there is some kind of psychic connection somewhere, and one could wonder: have we got it wrong about the nature of the universe? It’s a vanishingly small possibility, but it’s nevertheless a possibility. It would be so important to science if there were psychic phenomena, so I am very glad that there are just a couple of labs here and there which do get money and carry on investigating, because if we didn’t look we’d never find it. I don’t think we’ll ever find it. I don’t think it’s there, but I’m really glad that there are at least a few people going on looking, because it would transform everything in science if it were true.
That’s absolutely true. What do you think—apart from parapsychology, are there other fields within psychology where the consistency trap and engagement keep sway over other scientists who, despite the absence of results, continue to pursue barren lines of inquiry?
I don’t know of anywhere exactly like that. There is a big crisis in psychology at the moment because it’s very easy—particularly in the modern world with very fast communications—for a psychologist, if they are well-known, to make some claim and then everyone just believes it. It’s very, very hard then to get that out of the public consciousness. A very simple example is a famous experiment done which shows that if you talk to a group of people about old people and things to do with old people and so on, and talk to another group of people about youth and young people, individuals in the experimental group would walk down the corridor more slowly if they were thinking about old age than if they were thinking about youth. This is such a lovely idea that everyone believed it, but then when people tried to replicate it, they couldn’t. I don’t know what the latest is on this. But, of course, in that example and many others, it’s not that people try to keep on doing the same thing when they don’t get results—they’ll do enough of that and then change over and do something else. People will, however, go on bashing their head with the same theory, but that’s a very different argument. People become wedded to their favorite theory and they will go on and on, and there’s that famous statement that in order to have a new theory you just have to wait till the people who believe the old one die. Well, things are going too fast for that now, but it’s still true to some extent. People will cling to their theories; this is absolutely true in parapsychology and it’s true in a lot of psychology as well. It’s psychology itself, it is hard work to change your mind, and I was forced to do it very young. I was around 25 when I was really confronting the possibility that all my work up till then had been a waste of time. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but all I had discovered was that I couldn’t discover any paranormal phenomena, and when you’re 25 and you’ve done five years of work that seems like an awfully long time. I was forced to change my mind and was young enough to do it, so I’m not afraid of changing my mind. That said, it’s painful rather than pleasurable to think “I was wrong. I spent all this time doing these things which got me nowhere. I stupidly believed this and proclaimed this, what an idiot I am,” and find another way, so I understand quite well why it’s so hard. Nevertheless, the heart of being a good scientist is changing your mind when you’re wrong, and caring more about evidence than about whether your own theory is better than somebody else’s.
Yes, it’s very difficult. Let’s now move on to another topic, that of memetics. What were the circumstances in which you decided to pursue memetics?
That’s a much easier question than the previous ones. What happened was, in 1995 I was experiencing chronic fatigue for the first time. I’d had an exhausting summer and autumn, I fell ill in October, and Dan Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea had just come out (Dennett 1995). I had to spend an awful lot of time in bed, and I began reading that book. I had read The Selfish Gene, in which the term “meme” was originally coined, back in 1976, but I’d forgotten all about it (Dawkins 1989). Dennett’s book reminded me about memes. At the same time, my Ph.D. student was filling in for me during some of my lectures at the university. I saw quite a lot of him, and he wrote an essay for me about memes and consciousness. Those two things combined had me there lying in bed thinking about memes. Because I was a very slow reader due to my illness, I could only read a little bit at a time. I was lying in bed most of the time for six months or so, staring at the ceiling a lot because I was too tired to read or get up, I couldn’t type or do anything like that and there were no mobile phones in those days. I was cut off from the world, and I just thought and thought and thought, and all these ideas came to me. It went like this: if you think of culture as a second replicator, if you think genes are the first replicator propagating for their own benefit, trying to get copied whenever they can, and you then transfer that Darwinian idea to culture and say “gosh, every idea, habit, skill, story, song, whatever that I know, is information competing to get into my head to stay there and get propagated into somebody else’s head,” suddenly so many things in the world began to make sense. It was a revelation. The same revelation that often people get when they understand Darwin in the first place, when you suddenly grasp natural selection and how evolution works and you realize that design comes out of nowhere by this process of copying, varying and selecting. It was a rather similar revelation to me about memes—suddenly the world looked different, and it’s always looked this new different way to me ever since. So I had to bottle up these ideas because I couldn’t write anything. I just turned over ideas endlessly in my head. Notions about the origins of language and how language was a parasite in the first place, not like all sensible biologists who think that language evolved because it was adaptive for genes. Or about why people are altruistic; or why we have such huge brains because memes drive us to that, this was why I talked about memetic drive. All of these ideas were swarming around in my head and it wasn’t until the following summer, about a year after I first got ill, that I was able to begin writing. That was when I wrote The Meme Machine. So it was actually an illness that enabled the thinking that went into those ideas.
After the publication of The Meme Machine, memetics began enjoying massive popularity among scholars across various fields. Was this also reflected in the volume of empirical research?
No. There’s a big mismatch here. Memetics is absolutely not popular at all within the fields which it ought to apply to. There are probably less than half a dozen biologists that I know of who take memetics seriously. There are several very good books on cultural evolution at the moment. The particular one I’m reading now by Joseph Henrich (2016), The Secret of Our Success, claims that it’s because of culture we’re so different from every other species. Well, that’s what I said in The Meme Machine, but he does not take the view that memes are a replicator, and most other biologists agree with him. The word “meme” is not even in the index of that book, nor is my book cited there. So, within conventional biology and anthropology, cultural evolution has become a respectable field of study but memetics has not. The memetic slant on it is to say that all these cultural items which we call memes are a replicator competing to get themselves copied, and the consequences for us and our culture are a product of that competition. Whereas the standard view is that cultural evolution is ultimately in the service of genes and we don’t need to think in terms of a second replicator. So that’s all going on within biology. Memetics is not understood at all by the public because most people think that an Internet meme is the only sort of meme there is. We have a lot of problems here.
That’s true that we misunderstood the notion of memes because of Internet memes, but I remember that memetics was quite popular, and that much hope was placed in memetics as a conception unifying the achievements of the scientific study of people and of culture. In your view, has it lived up to those expectations, or will this perhaps occur in the near future?
No, it hasn’t lived up to these expectations, partly because it’s very, very difficult to make empirical tests to distinguish between memetic theory and standard cultural evolution theory. I am very disappointed and sad that I have not been clever or insightful enough to come up with such experiments. But also, at my age, I’m no longer interested in doing lab work or fieldwork myself, and there are so few people in the world who take a serious view of memetics that they’re not doing it either. I don’t think it’s impossible. I also like to think about the fact that, going back to Darwin in the first place, nobody could really make sense of his theory of evolution by natural selection until much later, when we began to get a grip on genetics, and that memetics may need a breakthrough like that. But recently I’ve been thinking it’s time to start writing about memes again, and I reread The Meme Machine. Richard Dawkins reread it too and wrote some wonderful tweets about how important a book it is. What struck me when I was reading it was that an awful lot of the things I said in there have come true in some way, and you can’t easily say “oh, well this proves it” because there are plenty of other theories around. But it has encouraged me a lot, and I think the whole advent of Internet memes has demonstrated the power of it. To me, what’s important about memetics is the difference between memetics and other theories, that memes are competitive; information is competing to get copied, and memes are the final arbiter. That’s what it’s all for. Dan Dennett, the philosopher, always asked the question “cui bono?”, or “who benefits?” In biology the genes benefit, and in culture the memes benefit. As I hinted at earlier, this is a radically different view from standard cultural evolution theory. I think standard cultural evolution theory can deal very well with most of human history and prehistory, but in the present day I don’t think it can. I think now we’re seeing dramatically the effects of meme competition on people’s lives and minds; the difficulties we have with fake news, the awful spreading of violent and horrible videos of all sorts. You can see the competition there between truth and falsehood, between nice things that make people happy and things that make them miserable, and the stress we are under by the fact that our brains are being used by all this information for its own sake, to get itself carried on. So I am contemplating writing more now about that and about what I think is happening next, which is that the information is itself taking over the processing and storage power of the technology we’re providing. We think we’re providing it for ourselves, but I think it’s actually being taken over now by a third replicator. If that’s what comes out of memetics and helps us to understand the problems we have with AI and other things at the moment, that will be really useful. And if I’m completely wrong, people can go on ignoring it.
The vision of reality you present in The Meme Machine and develop in Consciousness is a quite sobering one. In this vision we are merely the passive carriers of memes like the people in “Matrix” reduced to the role of energy sources. Don’t you think that highly pessimistic portrayal has contributed to the declining interest in conception?
I don’t know. When you say it’s sobering you could be referring to quite a lot of things. Let’s take a few of them. One thing is free will. It seems absolutely obvious to me that we can’t have free will, at least in the sense that most people think about their own free will, meaning we feel as if we can have a thought, and quite independently of anything else we can enact that thought, I can do anything I want just because of my thought. Yet you only need a cursory understanding of the brain to see that doesn’t make any sense. The precursors of every action this body does are in the brain and in the rest of the body, and it’s those things, the environment around me and the history of my life, that determine every action that I take. If by “sobering” you mean going from being drunk and happy to being sober and looking at things straight then yes, I agree. Is it horrible? Many people say “it’s so depressing, how could I live without believing in free will?” The answer is, I suppose, a bit like what we were saying earlier about changing your mind about scientific theories. It’s hard to give up the natural impression we all have that we are free in our minds, that it’s me and my mind controlling the brain. It’s not, but once you get used to that it’s actually wonderful because you can look at what’s driving the behavior of your own mouth when it speaks, and you can become more critical and careful about it, more amazed by the wonder of it. It’s tricky, it’s hard work to give up believing in free will, and you have to be morally cautious as well. But it’s wonderfully pleasing in the end.
Now let’s take the memetic view. If you take the view that all of our culture is selfish memes that have got here by being copied, then you begin to understand what it means to pass on different memes. You think about your own behavior in terms of which things you pass on and what the consequences are. I think about my little grandchildren, watching them learning language, learning to draw and other things like that. It’s so wonderful, and I’m thinking about the memetic environment that they’re growing up in, so I agree it’s sobering but I don’t think it’s depressing. But if we move on to my idea about technological memes, or “tremes” as I have come to call them, that’s worrying. My feeling is if I’m right and the machinery is increasingly being taken over by algorithms and structures of information that we can’t even see because they’re evolving in their own way for their own sake, then we are doomed to a scary future if we don’t work out what’s going on and react appropriately. That’s why I’m interested in talking about what I think is happening, which is just another example of the power of Darwin’s great insight into where design and creativity come from.
The conception of memetics is inextricably linked with considerations on the possibility of re-programming our mind to make it a carrier of only those memes that we ourselves wish to serve. Isn’t the thought that we could consciously become carriers of selected memes equally absurd as the conviction that we could decide which genes we wish to pass along to our offspring?
Yes, but the situation is very different with genes. It takes the technology of gene editing and so on for us to do that. But in terms of memes I think we need to see ourselves as meme machines. That was the whole point of the book, that we are both gene machines and meme machines; the genes have given us a tendency to like some things and not others, to pass on certain things and not others, to believe certain things and not others, to get trapped by certain ideas and not others, and so on. We start with the genetic basis of what we’re like, then we become educated: we become able to understand language, to read and write and everything else, and we have to become selective imitation devices. That’s what I’ve called us, selective imitation machines. It’s our job to survive, to select memes. So what you’re describing is what we do anyway, and what we have always done since humans existed. A kind of a battle to choose the memes that we believe will be good or true or helpful or useful to us in some way, and to reject the ones that won’t. The problem is that we’re not very good at it. And this is why I described a lot of the tricks that different memes use. The most obvious example here is religion.
I’m just horrified at the world today considering how, when I was a student 50 years ago, I honestly believed that religion was just going away. If anyone had told me then that there would be religious-based wars in the 21st century I would have been shocked. The point is that this is relates to the meme tricks. Religions have developed what I call the altruism trick, persuading their followers that they are good people if they believe this religion. This comes up again and again in all the monotheistic religions, the idea that you’re good because you believe in Jesus or because you follow Allah, or you’re good because you give money to the temple or whatever it might be. That is a horrible trick to play because our genes have given us the desire to be liked, to be respected, because if you’re liked and respected, you have a better time in life, you get more stuff if you’re seen to be good. We want to be seen to be good, even if we’re not. Religions just jump on that bandwagon and make people feel good by belonging, and yet we know the awful harm that religions do both to people and societies. Those are the kind of venues in which this competition plays out, and if I understood your question correctly, we have to be self-programming and hope that we have friends, colleagues and others who can help us with this job, to think critically about the effect of the memes that are all around us all the time, which ones we pick up, and in particular which ones we pass on to other people. But it gets harder and harder the more memes there are.
Yes, it’s a difficult task, so I’d like to ask you about what you do to manage it. As a sort of antidote to the dictatorship of memes, you suggest cleansing the mind through meditation and concentration on the here and now. How can you be certain that the belief in immersing oneself in the here and now isn’t just another memeplex that you yourself are the carrier of?
Oh, it is just another memeplex, absolutely. But I don’t think I’ve ever advocated for it in the way that you’re implying in the question. I don’t go around saying “oh, everybody must meditate.” I began meditating back in the early 1970s. I’ve been meditating every day now for more than 30 years. While I can’t prove it, I feel that this has helped me enormously in my life, to be less angry, to be less greedy, to be less aggressive, all the things I have a great tendency toward. But I can’t prove that, because it could be just due to getting older. What I have written about and stand by is that most forms of meditation are a kind of meme weeding. This applies particularly to the kind of Zen meditation I do—zazen, which means “just sitting,” and it is precisely that—just sitting.
I like the analogy of clearing, or weeding away, the memes because I’m also a great gardener. I spend a lot of time planting trees, growing vegetables, looking after the chickens, and I have a huge garden that is always full of weeds. So the obvious analogy came to me. When you’ve spent a long time getting rid of all the weeds from a patch of ground, it’s all clear and ready to sow whatever it is you want to grow there, but if you don’t do that within a couple of weeks it will be all covered in green again, because there are seeds everywhere that jump in at any opportunity. Learning to meditate is very much like that early stage, when you haven’t had much practice your brain is not used to dropping into quiet states. It’s really just brain training. What happens is, you sit down and try to calm your mind, then a bit of space clears and another thought comes in, followed by another and another. As soon as there’s space, another one turns up. That’s what the world is like in our minds, or when we turn on our computers. Another email comes in, another WhatsApp message, another text. That was the analogy that I made. I stand by that analogy, but I am not saying to people “oh, you have to go out there and do meditation in order to weed your mind of all its memes.” You can’t do that. You are a meme machine; you are a creature of memes. You can be selective about those memes, and if you choose to, you can take on the meditation memeplex. Sit down every day, quiet your mind and ultimately get to where your mind will just quiet itself when you sit down in meditation because it’s had years of practice. I think it’s helpful, but it’s not for everyone, and there are dangers in meditation. It’s not as if you can just clear your mind and start again. All I can do is choose and choose wisely between the different memeplexes that are around, and that is hard.
In The Meme Machine you stated rather succinctly that “Today’s psychotherapy is a kind of memetic engineering, but it is not based on sound memetic principles.” Could you perhaps elaborate on the subject of understanding psychotherapy through the prism of memetics?
There are so many different kinds of psychotherapy, from psychoanalysis based in ludicrous theories from a hundred years ago to modern kinds of CBT, which work pretty well for certain things. And there are all kinds of spiritual therapies and other things. But almost all of them are based on the concept of working with a self, and that the self is something that is important, to be made as good and as happy and as content as possible, to deal with our problems, and so on. In the memetic view, the self is a construct of memes. We only have this illusion of there being a “me” inside.
Let’s go back to the self for a little longer. I think the way we need to think about the self now—and I’m absolutely not alone, there are lots of neuroscientists and philosophers writing books about this for the last 10 years or so—is that the self is a construct of the brain. The self, the feeling of I, the responsibilities of being myself and so on, are all constructs of the brain. This leads us to be dualists, to believe that we are separate from the world that we’re in. We are sure that we are a conscious self in here looking out through our eyes and there’s an external world out there. I reject that, as many other people do, and my view of memetics replaces the dualist view. I replace it with the idea that one of the reasons why the self is so powerful in a person’s mind is because of the memes that have clung to the idea of self. They have built up the identity of that person, and cause them to cling to the theories they believe in. I don’t know of any memetics therapy that might exist, because I’m not a therapist and I’m not trained in therapy. There may be some out there, but the vast majority don’t take that view of the nature of self. And this actually relates to a fascinating question in meditation. People talking about meditation and progress in meditation often say that you need a really strong self before you can give up the self. For example, the Buddhist idea of self is something ephemeral that comes and goes, not permanent in any way. That argument has played out for over 2000 years. And then there’s this idea of therapy versus enlightenment. If enlightenment is in some ways giving up that false sense of self, should you go into therapy and obliterate people’s self? You can’t do that, because they won’t function as people in the world. So there is an alternative argument that you need to create a strong and stable self before you can go through the processes of acknowledging that self is just an ephemeral thing that comes and goes. I don’t have any answers, but that’s some of the context in which I said long ago that therapy is not based on memetic principles. If it were, it would have to tackle that difficult issue about the nature of self, about coming to terms with yourself being ephemeral and non-persistent, and there are plenty of therapists arguing about this kind of thing. But more obviously, you would look at the memes that people have been infected with throughout their life, the ones they cling to and spread most enthusiastically, and think about how you could help that person to live their life better. If they were taking in different kinds of memes, if they got themselves in different sorts of circumstances that they might meet different kind of memes, you would have them think about how they propagate the memes and the effect that has on their relationships with other people. This would not be dramatically different. You’d still be doing many of the same things, but it would be a different way of thinking about therapy. But as I said, I’m not a therapist, so I have not pursued that line of inquiry, nor tried to create any kind of therapy.
Do you think that different modalities, therapeutic modalities are different memeplexes?
Yes, of course they are. Take Rogerian theory, Jungian analysis, CBT or transpersonal therapy. They are indeed big memeplexes, and one’s hope is that by bringing such a memeplex to somebody in trouble you can help them, that the memeplex will help them sort out their primary problems. There’s a fundamental difficulty here. It sounds like I’m saying everything is a meme. So I need to clarify that all of culture is a meme. Everything I have ever said is a meme, every speech that you have ever heard is a meme, any information that is copied from person to person or person to book or person to computer or whatever is by definition a meme. That’s what a meme is, that kind of information. That doesn’t mean that everything is a meme, that all our thoughts are memes. If you don’t send something on it never becomes a meme. All the skills you have, physical skills like walking, riding a bike, driving a car; gardening is a wonderful example, memes are involved, but the skills of actually dealing with the earth and the plants are something else. These things are not memes; they are skills that you’ve learned as an animal with learning abilities. But all scientific theories, all religions, all political theories, money—they’re all memes because they have been copied and passed on.
Do you think that psychotherapy employs the kinds of tricks used by memes, similar to religions?
Yes, to some extent. I think that would certainly be true of psychoanalysis, which as a memeplex jibes very well with people’s dualistic views, the importance of their self, their worries about their parents and all such things, and some people love it. Some people are willing to spend enormous amounts of money for what we know has very poor outcomes. You can have 10 years of weekly psychoanalysis and not be much happier or function better in life than at the start. Some people find it miraculous, but in general the evidence suggests it’s not great. So it’s playing those kind of tricks because it appeals to people, because it seems to make a lot of sense, and then the evidence shows that most of Freud’s theories are incorrect. There are little bits in there with some value, but most of it is wrong, so that would be an example. My knowledge of modern therapies is limited, but I can see among the crazier versions, which I come across through parapsychology, that they prey on the same longing for the self to be important and feel better. They use similar tricks to religions in some ways. I think one of the most worrying ones is the idea that mixes spirituality with therapy in a very unhelpful way. “You will be a spiritual person. You can be more spiritual if you do these things and if you have this therapy, which will raise your vibrations to a higher spiritual level.” That sort of really wacky thing uses very unpleasant tricks because spirituality sounds so wonderful, and if you can get it by going to a particular therapist, some people will be drawn in regardless of evidence.
In the end it comes down to evidence. When you look at the evidence for different kinds of therapies, one of the most interesting things to come out in recent years was that most types of psychotherapy have some good effect, which occurs within the first one or two sessions. But that effect is not dependent upon the type of therapy, the individual person, or the length of time that therapist has been practicing. In other words, it looks as if a large proportion of psychotherapy is operating through the perfectly normal human interactions of sitting and listening to people. It’s not helped by years of training in different therapy methods. The evidence is more complicated than that, and since that global finding it’s been discovered that some therapies actually do some harm, the majority just do a little bit of good, and CBT seems to do pretty well for certain things. But I keep going back to evidence. It’s evidence that made me give up parapsychology. It’s evidence that has changed my mind about consciousness so many times, and that’s what I would say about therapy. We need evidence that it works. What do you want from this therapy? Can we measure that change at the end? And if it doesn’t help, that’s an awful lot of money people are throwing at it.
And their priceless time. In studying your conceptions, while also investigating various abuses of science, I am fighting the urge to conclude that science is nothing more than another memeplex whose sole objective is the replication of memes. It is served exceedingly well by the citation index and all sorts of influence rankings.
Yes, I absolutely agree with you. All science is memes. The difference between science and religion, or science and popular beliefs of various kinds, is evidence, and that’s what training as a scientist entails: how to assess evidence, how to find evidence, how to do experiments and so on. That’s what makes it different, that’s what has given us all the technology that we have now and what has helped us understand the world. Of course, it’s a never-ending process to try to understand it. It’s interesting that you raised the citation issue, because I don’t think it is the best science that gets the most citations. Nevertheless, it is a way of finding out which scientific contributions are most valued by other scientists. Because the more they’re cited the more other people appreciate them. But what worries me is the effect is a bit like Amazon books or so many other modern things. Once you have an index like that, people will cite the most popular ones because other people have cited them, and it exaggerates the difference between the uncited and the very frequently cited. I don’t think that’s a good thing.
Does this mean that the life of an idea in science, particularly psychology, subject to the dictates of fashion rather than other, rational laws?
Obviously many meme problems will occur: fashions, what people like and the things that people want to be true are probably more often cited than the ones they really wish weren’t true. But in the end the scientific method is about taking the evidence seriously, and that’s what we should all be doing. I think it’s becoming very hard now, considering the way universities are so stretched with too many students and all the other problems that we have in academia. Nevertheless, science has always had to deal with people who don’t like the things that fine science discovers, and we have very good methods for pushing back. That’s what science is all about. And we’re just working in a different way now than we did 50, 100 or 200 years ago, when there were so few ideas around. When Newton came up with his laws of motion, for example, it was very difficult to get any new ideas out at all, but people wrote letters to each other. Gradually the ideas got out and everybody heard about them. There weren’t so many ideas to compete with in those days. Now, any idea you put out has to compete, and that makes different problems in terms of popularity.
What in your opinion are other that mentioned before, big challenges presently facing psychology?
Probably the replication crisis. But I think psychology has long had a problem that people can’t identify. When I started studying psychology, there wasn’t any neuroscience, there wasn’t any cognitive psychology, all that sort of started when I was a student. And when I say I’m a psychologist, it’s those kinds of things that I’m talking about, while for the public, if I say “I’m a psychologist” they say “Oh, should I lay down on the couch?” That’s not what I do. So we have this problem in psychology, which is breaking apart in a way, and I think this needs to happen. I think we need to discriminate between the neuroscientific side, which is based on what’s happening in brain, and the therapeutic side, which is aimed at actually helping people. I’m not sure where things are going, but there’s a crisis of identity that’s long been brewing in psychology.
Will the development of artificial intelligence help us find answers to the big questions posed by psychology?
Yes, and this really interests me. I think that most people are worrying about the wrong sort of AI. They are concerned either with robots with artificial intelligence in them, in other words, the actual entities that are intelligent, or they’re worrying about artificial intelligence that we have created to do things. For example, the internet of things, and self-driving cars, which will have artificial intelligence driving them. These are, of course, genuine worries and people are dealing with them. What I’m concerned about is the idea that AI may be self-evolving as we create more and more servers, phones, computers and massive storage capacity using an increasing amount of the energy produced on this planet by fossil fuels. I suspect that this massive explosion of information is giving rise to a new replicator; information, algorithms and computer programs capable of copying other programs. We may not even be able to see everything that’s going on in this new evolving sphere. If you think about it this way, we should ask how our intelligence came about? It came about by ordinary biological evolution. A multicellular organism with billions of brain cells in it, each one a living cell—all of those things coming together doing pretty dumb things that, when put into a body, amount to intelligence. There’s no such thing called “intelligence” inside us. It’s all the things that all these cells do which makes the behavior of a human being intelligent. I would say what’s going on in the cloud in cyberspace is exactly the same process, bits here and there are all contributing dim things, but ultimately the result is intelligent. So the fact that I can talk to Siri or say “OK Google” and get an answer, that’s intelligent. And if you think of all the processing going on out there, with millions and millions of cameras sending information into the cloud all the time, video and still pictures, endless audio, and the ability of the machines to control what we say, do, and think all the time, and to actually speak to us—that’s intelligence, and it’s evolving. It’s evolving for its own sake, not for ours, and that is the bottom line for memetics. I think that’s what we should be worrying about in terms of artificial intelligence.
Question for dessert if you agree.
Sure.
I have a list of 30 questions that my readers would like to ask the most influential psychologists in the world. Please draw one.
27.
The most ridiculous idea in the history of psychology which was taken seriously?
What a really interesting question. I suggest two such ideas. The first one is that you could have a full and rich psychology without considering consciousness—or subjective experience. The second is the idea that you could treat a human or other animal as a “black box”, measuring only inputs and outputs without any concern for what may be going on inside. Both were standard assumptions when I was a student but, happily, not any more.
Would you like to add something to our conversation or mention issues we haven’t discussed yet?
I would like to give our readers a bit of encouragement and say that we have amazing brains and the capacity to think, and we live in an amazing world full of fantastic amounts of information. What could be more interesting than trying to understand the mind that is trying to understand itself? Psychology is a very special subject in that sense.