Susan Blackmore Quotes

Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.

What happens when an animal or person dies? Something seems to have departed--something like a vital spark that makes the difference between life and death. In the nineteenth century, philosophers believed that there really was such a thing and called it the élan vital, or vital spirit. But when twentieth century science began to unravel the mysteries of how living things work and reproduce, the idea was abandoned and people now accept that there is nothing more to being alive than complex, interrelated, biological functions.

Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.

I have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.

Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

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.

Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don't care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don't think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.

Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?

If we take memetics seriously then the 'me' that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine.

Science has, after all, made some colossal blunders in the past ... Our current materialism and its rejection of the idea of a spirit or soul might be just another great falsity.