Regarding memes (February 13), why is it so important to deny me even the tiniest crumb of a consciousness, self, will, Geist, Seele, soul, or whatever the heck you want to call it? What is so threatening about my having a little bit of choice? What is so terrifying about acknowledging my ability to choose between whether I will read two, three, or four bedtime stories tonight to my four-year-old son or, for that matter, whether to get a root beer instead of a Coke? Do I really have to have a meme for every little decision? Is it OK if I tell my memes to go jump in the lake? –clarkc, via the Straight Dope Message Board
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There, there. Uncle Cecil recognizes that his column, while certainly nailing the meme question, had the unfortunate side effect of rhetorically reducing his readers to zombies, leaving parties such as yourself in a nervous and uncertain state. So let me assure you: You have consciousness, and by the time I’m done you’ll have free will, too. (I’ll take a pass on whether you’ve got a soul.) There’s just one thing I can’t budge on, but in today’s postliterate society it’s something most folks won’t miss: You haven’t got a mind.
But how? After 50 years of floundering we can’t even agree on what it means to think. The subject leaves otherwise sensible people completely unnerved. To hear some talk, it’s as though abandoning the concept of pure mind obliges us to think of ourselves as mere automatons. Take memeticist Susan Blackmore, who believes the self and free will are illusions and that what we imagine to be our choices are actually the product of competing memes. For Blackmore, consciously trying to “decide” something is futile–the memes have already worked it out. In the closing pages of her book The Meme Machine she recommends a weird techno Zen approach in which we watch with detachment while our robot selves rattle through the preordained humdrum of existence. Other folks, while they don’t get quite that nutty, make much of the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, whose brain experiments suggest that awareness of the impulse to perform an act often arises after the act has begun–the implication being that decisions are made subconsciously, by memes or who knows what hidden agency, and that the conscious mind is just along for the ride.
