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The Children of Richard Dawkins
I argued above the Richard Dawkins does not do science. What, then, does he do? Well, you can read this paper submitted by Susan Blackmore to the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 4-5, 19-30, 2003 to see who uses his ideas, and how.
From Wikipedia:
Susan Blackmore has made contributions to the field of memetics. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
In his foreword to Blackmore's book The Meme Machine (1999), Dawkins said, "Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme."
Excerpt:
Consciousness is an illusion.
There are several ways of thinking about consciousness as an illusion. Most important is to distinguish them from the view that consciousness does not exist. To say that consciousness is an illusion is to say that it is not what it appears to be. This follows from the ordinary dictionary definitions of “illusion”, for example “Something that deceives or misleads intellectually” (Penguin); “Perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature.” (Webster). This point is frequently misunderstood. For example Velmans (2000) wrongly categorises Dennett’s position as eliminativist when it is better described as the view that consciousness is an illusion. I shall explore a version of this position here.
On this view human-like consciousness means having a particular kind of illusion. If machines are to have human-like consciousness then they must be subject to this same kind of illusion. I shall therefore explore one theory of how this illusion comes about in humans and how it might be created in machines; the theory of memetics.
Human beings as meme machines
Memes are ideas, habits, skills, stories, or any kind of behaviour or information that is copied from person to person by imitation (Dawkins 1976). They range from single words and simple actions to the vast memeplexes (co-adapted meme complexes) of science, art, religion, politics and finance. There are interesting difficulties concerning definitions (Aunger 2000, Blackmore 1998), and whether memes can be said to be replicated by means other than imitation, but the essential point is this. When people copy actions or words, those actions or words are copied with variation and then selectively retained and copied again. In other words the actions and words (the memes) fulfil the conditions for being a replicator in a Darwinian evolutionary process (Dawkins 1976, Dennett 1995).
This new evolutionary process can only run if the replication process is good enough (has high enough fidelity). Some species of birds, and some cetaceans, can copy sounds with high fidelity, and their songs are therefore memes. But very few other species can imitate at all. Even chimpanzees and orangutans are, at best, poor imitators and there is much debate over the extent to which they are really able to copy observed behaviours (Dautenhahn and Nehaniv 2002). Humans appear to be the only species that readily and easily imitates a wide variety of sounds and actions. This suggests that we alone are supporting this second evolutionary process; cultural or memetic evolution. If this is so human evolution must have taken a very different course from that of other species once we became capable of imitation. I have suggested that human brains and minds were designed by the replicator power of this new process and that this explains why humans are so different from other species (Blackmore 1999).
There are two aspects of this that are relevant to machine consciousness. First there is how we living humans got to have such large and peculiarly capable brains (the co-evolutionary story). Second is how our individual minds and our sense of self and consciousness are designed by memetic pressures (the developmental story). Both are relevant to the possibility of machine consciousness.
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Mind design by memes
The second relevant issue is how memes design individual minds; that is, how the design process of evolution unfolds in the case of individual people infected with a lifetime of competing memes.
We spend our lives bombarded by written, spoken, and other memes. Most of these are ignored. Some are remembered but not passed on. Others are both remembered and passed on. Some are recombined in novel ways with others to produce new memes. Note that there is much dispute about whether we should use the word ‘meme’ to apply only to the behaviours themselves, only to the patterns of neural representation (or whatever underlies their storage inside brains), or to both (Aunger 2000). I shall stick to Dawkins’s original definition here, treating memes as “that which is imitated”, or “that which is copied”. So I shall not distinguish between memes instantiated in books, computers, ephemeral behaviours or human brains, since all can potentially be replicated.
On the memetic hypothesis, human development is a process of being loaded with, or infected by, large numbers of memes. As Dennett (1995) puts it “Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless ‘images’ and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.” (Dennett 1991 p 254). Language is the mainstay of this process. We have brains specially designed to absorb the language we hear (see above), to deal with grammar, and to imitate the particular sounds of the language(s) we grew up with. By the age of about three years the word “I” is used frequently and with increasing sophistication. The word “I” is initially essential to distinguish one physical person from another, but very rapidly becomes used to say things like “I think”, “I like”, “I want”, “I believe” “That’s mine” and so forth, as though there were a central self who has opinions, desires and posessions. In this way, I suggest, a false notion of self is constructed.
There have been very many theories of the formation of this illusory self (Gallagher & Shear 1999). The difference between other theories and the memetic theory proposed here lies in the question “Who benefits?”. Previous theories suggest that either the individual person or their genes are the primary beneficiaries; memetic theory suggests that the memes are (Dennett 1995). I have argued as follows (Blackmore 1999); once a child is able to talk about his or her self then many other memes can obtain a replication advantage by tagging onto this growing memeplex. For example, saying a sentence such as “I believe x” is more likely to get ‘x’ replicated than simply saying ‘x’. Memes that can become my desires, my beliefs, my preferences, my ideas and so on, are more likely to be talked about by this physical body, and therefore stand a better chance of replication. The result is the construction of an increasingly elaborate memetic self. In other words, the self is a vast memeplex; the selfplex (Blackmore 1999).
The selfplex and the illusion of consciousness
The result of the memetic process described above is that physical, speaking, human bodies use the word ‘I’ to stand for many different things; a particular physical body; something inhabiting, controlling and owning this body; something that has beliefs, opinions, and desires; something that makes decisions; and a subject of experience. This is, I suggest, a whole concatenation of mistakes resulting in the false idea of a persisting conscious self.
The view proposed here has much in common with James’s (1890) idea of the appropriating self, and with Dennett’s (1991) “centre of narrative gravity”. There are two main differences from Dennett. First, Dennett refers to the self as a “benign user illusion”, whereas I have argued that it is malign; being the cause of much greed, fear, disappointment, and other forms of human suffering (Blackmore 2000). Second (and more relevant here) Dennett says “Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes....” (Dennett 1991 p 210).
There is reason to question this. Dennett’s statement implies that if a person were without memes they would not be conscious. We cannot, of course, strip someone of all their memes without destroying their personhood, but we can temporarily quieten the memes’ effects. Meditation and mindfulness can be thought of as meme-weeding techniques, designed to let go of words, logical thoughts, and other memetic constructs and leave only immediate sensory experience. The nature of this experience changes dramatically with practice, and it is common for the sense of a self who is having the experiences to disappear. This same selflessness, or union of self and world, is frequently reported in mystical experiences. But far from consciousness ceasing, it is usually described as enhanced or deepened, and with a loss of duality. If this experience can justifiably be thought of as consciousness without memes, then there is something left when the memes are gone and Dennett is wrong that consciousness is the memes. It might then be better to say that the ordinary human illusion of consciousness is a “complex of memes” but that there are other kinds of consciousness.
This is, however, a big ‘if’, and raises all the problems associated with first-person exploration of consciousness (see Pickering 1997, Varela & Shear 1999). At present we should not think of this so much as evidence against Dennett’s view as a motivation for further research and self-exploration. It might turn out that if meditation is even more deeply pursued and the selfplex is completely dismantled, then all consciousness does cease and Dennett is correct.
The alternative I want to defend here is that memes distort consciousness into an illusion rather than constitute it. On this view the underlying consciousness itself remains unexplained but we can understand the particular nature of ordinary human consciousness in terms of the selfplex. By creating the illusion of self for their own survival and replication, memes are responsible for our false sense that there is always an ‘I’ having experiences, and for the inherent dualism that bedevils all our attempts to understand consciousness.
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Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism." Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
Please look at the picture to the right, and divide the people into two biologically different groups.
And, of course, there is the problem of what a gene is. If we try to define a gene as a specific sequence of DNA, we run into the issue that identical sequences of DNA may be found in different genes and have entirely different effects. Also, two different genes can have two different sequences, but have the same effect in the organism. Extra DNA bases added onto the end of a gene may have no or little effect, while the imposition of just one DNA base pair into the middle of a sequence will cause what is called a frame shift error, radically distorting or entirely deactivating the effect of that gene. And during sexual reproduction, genes routinely become crossed with each other, such that the chromosomes you pass on to your children will be mixed partial combinations of the chromosomes you inherited from your parents. Genes are far from well defined immortal units. Any definition of a gene based merely on base pair sequence is inadequate. One is always forced back on to a functional definition of genes. And the function of a gene is an emergent property of the organism, not an atomic property of the base pairs.
Let's compare selfish gene theory with another notion of a similar (1972) age in the literature. The theory of