The Meme Machine

226 THE MEME MACHINE
of the action, the moment of the decision to act, and the start of a particular brain
wave pattern called a readiness potential. This pattern is seen just before any
complex action, and is associated with the brain planning the series of
movements to be carried out. The question was, which would come first, the
decision to act or the readiness potential?
If you are a dualist you may think that the decision to act must come first. In
fact what Libet found was that the readiness potential began about 550
milliseconds (just over half a second) before the action, and the decision to act
about 200 milliseconds (about one-fifth of a second) before the action. In other
words, the decision to act was not the starting point – a finding that can seem a
little threatening to our sense of self. There was much controversy over his
results and many criticisms of the experiments, but given all I have said above,
his results were only to be expected. There is no separate self jumping into the
synapses and starting things off. My brain does not need me.
So what does my Self do? Surely it must at least be the centre of my
awareness; the thing that receives impressions as I go about my life? Not
necessarily. This false view is just part of Dennett’s illusory Cartesian Theatre.
You can think about this either logically, or from the point of view of your own
experience. We have already considered the logic; so now let us try to
introspect carefully. Sit down comfortably and look at something uninteresting.
Now concentrate on feeling the sensations from your body and on hearing what
is going on around you. Stay like that long enough to get used to it and then ask
yourself some questions. Where is that sound? Is it inside my head or over
there? If it’s over there, then what is hearing it? Can I be conscious of the thing
that is hearing it? If so, am I separate from that thing as well?
You can make up your own questions. The general idea is an old one, and
has been used in many meditation traditions over the millennia. Staring
determinedly into your own experience does not reveal a solid world observed
by a persisting self but simply a stream of ever-changing experience, with no
obvious separation between observed and observer. The eighteenth-century
Scottish philosopher David Hume explained that whenever he entered most
intimately into himself he always stumbled upon some particular perception – of
heat or cold or pain or pleasure. He could never catch himself without a
perception, nor observe anything but the perception. He concluded that the self
was no more than a ‘bundle of sensations’ (Hume 1739–40). The very natural
idea that ‘I’ hear the sounds, feel the sensations, or see the world may be false.
Another series of experiments by Libet (1981) adds an interesting twist to the