I have always been obsessed by the mystery of
consciousness – at least, for as long as I can remember. As a young
child I used to worry about the nature of heat and light, and how the
universe was created, but in my teens I became interested in the
paranormal and the nature of mind. At university I had a very dramatic
out-of-the body experience which convinced me that my soul had left my
body. I became determined to become a parapsychologist and prove all
my close-minded Oxford lecturers wrong.
But it turned out to be I who was wrong. I did
make it as a parapsychologist, and spent nearly 30 years investigating
the paranormal, but by the end I was as convinced as anyone can be
that there is no such thing. In all those years of meeting psychics
and clairvoyants, healers and spiritualists, not once did I find a
convincing paranormal phenomenon. I learned a great deal about fraud
and self-deception. It seems to me now that people so want to believe
in the meaning of life, an inner spirit or soul, and its survival
after bodily death that they will take any pathetic scrap of evidence,
or any third-hand story that fits their prior beliefs and grasp onto
it as proof. And the media, of course, pander to this desire.
I could have got deeply depressed about all this
but two things saved me. One is my training as a scientist. In science
you have to learn – difficult as it is – to keep an open mind and
to reject your own firmly held beliefs if the evidence goes against
them. I am glad now that I learned this the hard way and early in my
life. And yes, it was hard. It was awful to set out as a young PhD
student with what I thought was a brilliant new theory that would
explain mind, memory and consciousness, and then to find that I was
wrong. But that’s how science gets closer to the truth.
The other is my training in Zen. Back in those
heady student days I tried many things; I trained as a witch, learned
ritual magic, read Tarot cards, and took many of the most exciting and
interesting drugs, but eventually I stumbled across Zen. I am not a
Buddhist; I won’t sign up to any dogmas or creeds, but I have been
practising Zen now for more than twenty years. This means daily
meditation, or “just sitting”, paying attention and letting go. It
also means applying the same in daily life, something like John
Lennon’s “words of wisdom – let it be”. Through this practice
one learns that everything is empty and ephemeral, including the self
who seems to be practicing.
This is most peculiar. If there is no real
“me” who has consciousness and free will, then what on earth is
going on? This is the great matter into which one looks deeply in Zen
practice.
Happily it is also the great mystery that
scientists are delving into. When we look inside the brain there is
just a vast mass of interconnected brain cells and no one who is
directing the show. Indeed there is no show. So how come it feels as
though “I” am inside my brain, looking out through “my” eyes
at the world outside? This really sums up the problem of consciousness
facing philosophers and scientists today, and I have spent the past
few years tackling this head on. I decided that if I was really going
to understand consciousness I should give up my university job, read
as much as I could, and write the first ever textbook of the subject.
This book was published in 2003 and since then I have written two more
books on consciousness. I still don’t understand it!
But before that came the other intellectual
thread that was to have such an impact. In 1995, after spending years
working much too hard, I succumbed to chronic fatigue (I won’t use
the meaningless term ME). I was too weak to walk, and so tired that I
slept more than 12 hours a day for many months. During all this time I
could do little but read for short periods and I began reading about
memes. This is Richard Dawkins’s idea that culture is an evolving
system just like the living world. In the case of biology genes are
the selfish units of information that compete to get copied from
generation to generation. In the case of culture it is ideas, stories,
songs, works of art, or technologies that compete – he called these
“memes”. In this view all the man made things we see around us are
there because they have succeeded in using us to store and copy them.
We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own
propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have
unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is
spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources.
This is how I became interested in the role of
art and creativity. We may think that human consciousness is what
makes us creative, but on this new view, all creativity is an
evolutionary process. Just as elephants and the AIDS virus were novel
creations of genetic evolution, so all of music, literature and art
are novel creations of memetic evolution. We human meme machines copy
old memes, mix them up in our heads, and spew out new combinations –
the most creative of us being the best copiers and recombiners of
memes.
This is a scary view of the world, and very far
indeed from the comforting, psychic and self-based world I once hoped
(and tried to prove) was true. But I think it is a lot closer to the
truth. We humans are evolved meme machines. Free will and
consciousness are wonderful delusions that it is difficult, but
possible, to live without. I still battle with the mystery of
consciousness but I now know that there is really no one inside here
who is writing the books and articles, or looking at the world. It is
all the pointless universe doing its stuff.
