The Meme Machine

THE ULTIMATE MEMEPLEX 221
Of course, this is both practically and conceptually daft. Unless we can
identify this inner self the experiment could not be done, and even then it
implies a further self to do the choosing. However, the point is this. I bet you
did make a choice and I bet you chose to keep your inner self. However daft the
notion is, we seem to have it, and have it bad. We think of ourselves as
something separate from our brains and bodies. This is what needs explaining,
and so far we are not getting on very well.
This problem applies to any scientific theory that leaves the sense of self out
of the picture. The most thorough-going reductionist view of this kind is what
Nobel laureate Francis Crick calls ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’:
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your
memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identify and free will, are in
fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re
nothing but a pack of neurons’ (Crick 1994, p. 3).
There are at least two problems with this. First, you do not feel like a pack of
neurons. So what the theory needs, and does not provide, is an explanation of
how a pack of neurons comes to believe that it is actually an independent
conscious self. Second, the theory does not say which neurons. It cannot be all
neurons because did am not consciously aware of most of what goes on in my
brain; ‘I’ do not identify with the neurons that control glucose levels in my
blood or the fine movements that keep me sitting up straight. On the other hand
if you try to identify ‘self’ neurons you are doomed to trouble. All neurons look
much the same under the microscope and all of them are doing something all the
time regardless of what ‘I’ am doing. Crick is working on the theory that
neurons bound together by simultaneous firing at 40 cycles per second form the
basis for visual awareness, but this is not the same as a theory of a conscious
self.
Note that this theory is more reductionist than many others. Crick not only
assumes that you are utterly dependent upon the actions of nerve cells – most
neuroscientists assume that – but that you are nothing but the pack of neurons.
Other scientists assume that new phenomena may emerge from simpler ones,
and cannot be understood by understanding the underlying neurons and their
connections. For example, we cannot understand human intentions, motivations,
or emotions just by obsessing the behaviour and connections of neurons, any
more than we can understand the activity of a desktop computer by looking at its
chips and circuits. On this more common view the intentions depend completely