Never before have I read a book review that so
completely misunderstands and misrepresents what I was trying to
say.
Campbell starts by defining memes as packets of
knowledge built up out of atomic units and encoding something. They
are not - and he has managed three mistakes already. Memes are
information copied from person to person by imitation. There is no
necessary connection to knowledge here. For example, the habit of
facial piercing is currently a successful meme in Britain. All over
the city I see people with rings in their noses, and studs in their
eyebrows and lips. In what sense do these people know something that
they did not know before they joined the fashion? Trying to define
memes as packets of knowledge just misses the point. They are
behaviours that either spread or fail to spread.
Memes are not really units or packets either.
Although it is convenient to talk about them as units (and in fact
almost impossible not to) they do not come neatly divided into
chunks, any more than genes do - a point I discuss at length in
The Meme Machine. Finally I never said that memes “encode
something” and would not wish to.
This idea about encoding is all Campbell’s own,
but he even attributes to me “a view of knowledge as encoding and
language as encoding-transmission”. I hardly know what to make of
this suggestion since I did not once use the word ‘encode’ with
respect to memes and I do not hold a strong view on the nature of
knowledge. He says “Blackmore casually assumes that internal
representation is just like external representation” but I do not.
Fortunately memetics does not depend upon the slippery notions of
symbolic reference or representation. Instead we can build new
theories about human nature by asking which memes are copied, which
are not, and why.
With respect to language, I suggested that
human brains acquired their language ability by the co-evolution of
memes with the machinery that copies them. As soon as our ancestors
began imitating sounds, some sounds were copied more than others.
These successful memes then changed the environment of selection for
the genes, forcing them to create brains capable of copying the
successful memes. This theory of memetic driving may be wrong, but
it depends on a straightforward mechanism derived from the
principles of natural selection; it is testable, and it does not
depend on any notions of encoding, symbolism or internal
representations.
Since Campbell’s review is based on his false
definition of memes it is difficult to know how to respond to many
of his arguments. So I will just confine myself to countering two
more of the views he falsely attributes to me.
First he claims that “According to Blackmore”
human beings are “purely imitative rather than innovative”. I fear
he may have missed the whole point of the creative power of
evolution. Darwin’s great insight was to see that if you have
creatures that vary, and then selection (i.e. most of them die), and
finally heredity (the survivors pass on whatever helped them
survive), then you must get the evolution of new creatures.
This is innovation par excellence. It is how you and I and
all other creatures on this planet were designed. The whole point of
memetics is to apply this same insight to memes rather than genes,
and so to understand how human culture and creativity come about. We
humans copy masses of memes, and mix them up in our clever brains to
produce new combinations. Yes, the whole process is based on copying
information by imitation, but it is inherently a creative and
innovative process - arguably the only creative process there is.
Second there is my “denial of self”. Here
Campbell’s mistake is easier to understand and I have probably been
guilty of being confusing. So let me try to be clear now. I do not
say there is no self - only that the self is not what we commonly
think it is. The self is not a persisting entity with free will and
consciousness that lives inside “my” body, perceiving the world and
making the decisions. Rather it is a memeplex, or collection of
memes that have come together for mutual protection and support. It
is a kind of story about a self that does not really exist. And its
function is not to serve us, nor our genes, but our memes.
This memeplex can get so entrenched that it
colours our entire lives with false dualities, and causes all the
suffering of self-conscious embarrassment, disappointment, and fear
of failure. I suggested that it is possible to drop this false self.
Campbell clearly disagrees but his arguments
include quoting “a clinical psychologist” who commented (as though
it were an obvious fact) that as long as there is awareness there is
self. This may be a common view but is not one that stands much
scrutiny. There are two ways to tackle it - both equally valid in my
view. One is to use intellectual arguments like Dennett’s (1991)
demolition of the Cartesian Theatre, to show that the notion of a
separate self perceiving the contents of awareness must be false.
The other is simply to look into one’s own experience. Many people,
whether spontaneously or through long training in meditation, have
arrived at experience with no perceiving self, no inner agent, no
separation of self from other. Their insight is not easily obtained
but is reliably described (e.g. Pickering 1997, Varela & Shear
1999). To those who wish to deny even the possibility of such
experience, I can only say - try it.
Memetics may not be a useful new science, and
some of my theories about the memetic origins of the big brain,
language, human altruism or the self may be false, but if so it will
not be for the reasons Campbell gives, for the memetics he describes
does not
exist.
References
Dennett,D. (1991). Consciousness Explained.
Boston, Little, Brown
Pickering,J.(Ed) (1997) The Authority
of Experience: Essays on Buddhism and Psychology, London, Curzon
Press.
Varela,F. and Shear,J. (1999) The View From
Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness,
Thorverton, Imprint Academic
