The Meme Machine

THE ULTIMATE MEMEPLEX 229
this story? If no persistent conscious self exists, why do people believe it does?
How is it that people routinely live their lives as a lie?
The most obvious kind of explanation to try is that having a sense of self
benefits the replication of our genes. Crook (1980) argues that selfconsciousness
arose from using Machiavellian Intelligence and reciprocal
altruism, with its need for balancing the trust and distrust of others. In a rather
dualistic version of a similar theory Humphrey (1986) suggests that
consciousness is like an inner eye observing the brain. As primates developed
ever more complex social structures, their survival began to depend on more
sophisticated ways of predicting and outwitting others’ behaviour. In this, he
argues, Homo psychologicus would win out. Imagine a male who wanted to
steal a mate from his rival or get more than his fair share of a kill. Predicting
what the rival would do next would help, and one way to predict what others
will do is to observe your own inner processes. These and other theories suggest
that a complex social life makes it necessary to have a sense of self, to tot up
scores in reciprocation, and to develop what psychologists now call a ‘theory of
mind’ – that is, the understanding that other people have intentions, beliefs, and
points of view.
However, this does not explain why our theory of mind is so wrong. Surely
one could understand one’s own behaviour without creating the idea of a
separate and persistent self when it does not exist. Crook and Humphrey jump
from the idea that early hominids might have benefited genetically by having an
accurate model of their own behaviour to the idea that they would therefore
acquire the idea of a separate self. Our self, the self we are trying to understand,
is not just a model of how our own body – and by inference other bodies – is
likely to behave, but a false story about an inner self who believes things, does
things, wants things and persists throughout life.
Self-deception can have benefits. According to Trivers’ (1985) theory of
adaptive self-deception, hiding intentions from oneself may be the best way to
hide them from others, and so deceive them. However, this theory does not help
in the case of inventing a central self. Dennett (1991) describes us as adopting
‘the intentional stance’; that is, we behave ‘as if’ other people (and sometimes
animals, plants, toys and computers) have intentions, desires, beliefs, and so on.
He argues that this metaphor of agency is a practical necessity of life; it gives us
new and useful tools for thinking with. The problem is, it seems to me, that we
apply this intentional stance too thoroughly to ourselves – we fall too deeply into
the ‘benign user illusion’. We do not say to ourselves ‘it’s as if I have
intentions, beliefs and desires’ but ‘I really do’. I am left wondering how we get