Susan Blackmore Quotes & Sayings

For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

All other species on this planet are gene machines only. They don't imitate at all well; we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well. — Susan Blackmore

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

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes. — Susan Blackmore

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example. — Susan Blackmore

Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection ... has no purpose in mind'.
I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight. — Susan Blackmore

If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

All things considered, I can see no reason to adopt the afterlife hypothesis. I am sure I shall remain in a minority for a long time to come, especially among experiencers, but for me the evidence and the arguments are overwhelming ... We are biological organisms, evolved in fascinating ways for no purpose at all and with no end in mind. We are simply here and this is how it is. I have no self and "I" own nothing. There is no one to die. There is just this moment, and now this, and now this. — Susan Blackmore

If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

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

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? — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

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. — Susan Blackmore

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

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. — Susan Blackmore

'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. — Susan Blackmore