The Meme Machine

THE ULTIMATE MEMEPLEX 223
Braille, or in their long white cane when walking. Drivers sometimes inhabit the
edges of their cars and wince if something passes too close. So is there anything
actually at this imagined spot? Presumably not in the case of the stick or the car,
but it still feels as though there is a self in there somewhere. Where, then,
should we look for the self?
The most obvious place to look is in the brain. Drugs that affect the brain
affect our sense of self, and damage to various areas of the brain can destroy or
change it. Stimulating the brain with electrodes can produce changes in body
image, feelings of shrinking or expanding, or sensations of floating and flying.
Yet we do not feel as though we are inside a warm, wet, and pulsating organ. In
a lurid thought experiment Dennett (1978) imagines his brain being removed to
a vat in a life-support lab while his body roams around as usual, connected to his
body as intricately as it ever was before, but by radio links instead of nerves.
Now where would Dennett feel he was? As long as he could see and hear, he
would feel as though he was wherever his eyes and ears were. He would not
fancy himself to be inside the vat. Of course, we cannot do the experiment to
check his intuitions, but it suggests the disturbing conclusion that Dennett would
still imagine he was living in there, somewhere behind his eyes, even if the skull
were empty and his brain were controlling things from the vat.
If we look inside the brain we do not see a self. To the naked eye a human
brain looks like a lump of rather solid porridge with a convoluted shiny surface
and various areas of paler or darker grey; it is hard to believe that all our
thinking goes on in there. Only with high magnification and the techniques of
modern neuroscience can we find out that it contains about a hundred billion
neurons or nerve cells. The neurons are connected up in fantastically complex
ways and, by virtue of these connections, store and process the information that
controls our behaviour. However, there is no centre of action where a self might
reside. There is no one place into which all the inputs go, and from which all the
instructions get sent out. This is an important point, and deeply disturbing. We
feel as though we are a central observer and controller of what goes on, but there
is no place for this central controller to live.
Let us consider what happens when you perform a simple task. For example,
find a letter ‘p’ on this page and then point to it. What has gone on? It may feel
as though you have decided to find a ‘p’ (or not if you could not be bothered),
searched the next few lines, found one, and then commanded your finger to
move into position and touch it. The role of the self seems obvious, ‘you’