The Meme Machine

230 THE MEME MACHINE
from the evolutionary advantage of having a theory of mind, or the practical
advantage of adopting the intentional stance, to living our lives as a lie,
protecting our ideas, convincing others of our beliefs, and caring so much about
an inner self who does not exist.
Perhaps we create and protect a complex self because it makes us happy. But
does it? Acquiring money, admiration, and fame gives some kind of happiness,
but it is typically brief. Happiness has been found to depend more on having a
life that matches your skills to what you are doing than to having a rich lifestyle.
The Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) studied the fulfilling
experience of ‘flow’ that artists describe when they lose themselves in their
work. ‘Flow’ comes to children planning games, people deep in conversation,
people skiing or mountain climbing, playing golf or making love. These all
entail the same sense of happiness through loss of self-consciousness.
What makes you happy? Or consider the reverse: what makes you unhappy?
Probably it is things like disappointment, fear of the future, worry about loved
ones, not having enough money, people not liking you, living too stressful a life,
and so on. Many of these things are only relevant to a creature that has selfawareness
and the idea of a self as the owner of experience. Other animals can
show disappointment, as when food does not arrive when they expect it, but they
cannot have the deep disappointment of not getting a job, the fear of being
thought stupid, or the misery of thinking someone they care about does not like
them. We construct many of our miseries out of the idea of a persistent self that
we desperately want to be loved, successful, admired, right about everything,
and happy.
According to many traditions this false sense of self is precisely the root of
all suffering. This idea is probably clearest in Buddhism with the doctrine of
anatta or no self. This does not mean that there is no body, nor that there is
literally no self at all, but that the self is a temporary construction, an idea or
story about a self. In a famous speech, the Buddha told the monks ‘actions do
exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not’ (Parfit
1987). He taught that because we have the wrong idea about our self, we think
that we will be happy if we gain more material things, or status or power. In fact
it is wanting some things and being averse to others that makes us unhappy. If
only we could realise our true nature then we would be free of suffering because
we would know there is no ‘me’ to suffer.
Now we can see the difference between Dennett’s view and the Buddhist
one. Both understand the self to be some kind of story or illusion, but for
Dennett it is a ‘benign user illusion’ and even a life-enhancing illusion, while for