The Meme Machine

236 THE MEME MACHINE
language and our memetic environment, we are all repositories of vast numbers
of memes, some of them simply pieces of stored information, others organised
into self-protecting memeplexes. The memes themselves have come from other
people and will, if we speak and write and communicate, go on into yet more
people. We are the temporary conglomerations of all these replicators and their
products in a given environment.
Then there is the self we think we are. Among all these memeplexes is an
especially potent one based around the idea of an inner self. Each selfplex has
been put together by the processes of memetic evolution acting in the relatively
short period of one human lifetime. ‘I’ am the product of all the memes that
have successfully got themselves inside this selfplex – whether because my
genes have provided the sort of brain that is particularly conducive to them, or
because they have some selective advantage over other memes in my memetic
environment, or both. Each illusory self is a construct of the memetic world in
which it successfully competes. Each selfplex gives rise to ordinary human
consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in
charge.
The ways we behave, the choices we make, and the things we say are all a
result of this complex structure: a set of memeplexes (including the powerful
selfplex) running on a biologically constructed system. The driving force behind
everything that happens is replicator power. Genes fight it out to get into the
next generation, and in the process biological design comes about. Memes fight
it out to get passed on into another brain or book or object, and in the process
cultural and mental design comes about. There is no need for any other source
of design power. There is no need to call on the creative ‘power of
consciousness’, for consciousness has no power. There is no need to invent the
idea of free will. Free will, like the self who ‘has’ it, is an illusion. Terrifying as
this thought seems, I suggest it is true.
Free mid
Benjamin chose cornflakes this morning for breakfast. Why? He did so because
he is a human with human tastes and the genetic make-up that inclines him
towards carbohydrates in the morning, especially this morning when he was
rather hungry. He lives in a rich society where cornflakes have been invented
and he has enough money to buy them. He responds positively to the picture on
the packet and the advertisements he sees. Memes and genes together produced
this behaviour in this environment. If asked, Benjamin will say that he chose the