The Meme Machine

THE ULTIMATE MEMEPLEX 227
argument. Conscious sensory impressions can be induced by stimulating the
brain, but only when it is continuously stimulated for about half a second. It is
as though consciousness takes some time to build up. This would lead to the
odd idea that our conscious appreciation of the world lags behind the events, but
because of a process Libet calls ‘subjective antedating’ we never realise it is
lagging behind. The story we tell ourselves puts events in order. Further
experiments showed that with short stimuli (too short to induce conscious
sensation) people could nevertheless guess correctly whether they were being
stimulated or not (Libet et al. 1991). In other words they could make correct
responses without awareness. Again the implication is that consciousness does
not direct the action. Conscious awareness comes all right, but not in time. The
hand is removed from the flame before we consciously feel the pain. We have
whacked the tennis ball back before we can be conscious of it coming towards
us. We have avoided the puddle before we were conscious of its existence.
Consciousness follows on later. Yet we still feel that ‘I’ consciously did these
things.
Something else we think we do is to believe things. Because of our beliefs
we argue vehemently over dinner that President Clinton really could not have
done it, that the Israelis ought (or ought not) to have built those homes, that
private education ought to be abolished, or that all drugs should be legalised.
We are so convinced of our belief in God that we will argue for hours (or
perhaps even go to war or lay down our life for Him). We are so convinced by
the alternative therapy that helped me that we force its claims on all our friends.
But what does it mean to say that I believe? It sounds as though there must be a
self in there who has things called beliefs, but from another perspective there is
only a person arguing, a brain processing the information, memes being copied
or not. We cannot actually find either the beliefs or the self who believes.
The same can be said of memory. We speak as though the self pulls up
memories at will from its personal store. We conveniently ignore the fact that
memories are ever-changing mental constructions, that often we fail to
remember accurately, that some memories come unbidden and that we often use
complex memories with no conscious awareness at all. It is more accurate to
say that we are just human beings doing complex things that need memory and
who then construct a story about a self who does the remembering.
In this, and many other ways, we seem to have an enormous desire to
describe ourselves (falsely) as a self in control of ‘our’ lives. The British
psychologist Guy Claxton suggests that what we take for self control is just a
more or less successful attempt at prediction. Much of the time our predictions