The Meme Machine

238 THE MEME MACHINE
First, by consciousness I mean subjectivity – what it’s like being me now (p.
2). This subjectivity comes about in ways we do not understand, yet we do
know that it depends critically on what the brain is doing at any time. We can
look at it this way – the quality of my consciousness at any time depends on
what the whole brain is doing, but particularly on the way the brain’s processing
resources are divided up, and the stories that are being constructed about who is
doing what. In our normal state of consciousness the whole experience is
dominated by the selfplex which uses words and other useful memetic constructs
to weave a very fine tale. It sets everything in the context of a self who is doing
things. However, when gazing in awe at the view from a mountain top, or
engrossed in a creative task, the selfplex does not dominate and other states of
consciousness are possible. Then there can be consciousness without selfconsciousness.
Note that here my view departs from Dennett’s. For him ‘Human
consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects
in brains)’ (Dennett 1991, p. 210). This means that a person is conscious by
virtue of having all the thinking tools that memes provide, including the ‘benign
user illusion’ and all the self memes, and without them they would, presumably,
cease to have ‘human consciousness’. By contrast, I suggest that the user
illusion obscures and distorts consciousness. Ordinary human consciousness is
indeed constrained by the selfplex, but it does not have to be. There are other
ways of being conscious.
There are implications here for artificial consciousness and for animals. If
ordinary human consciousness is entirely dominated by the selfplex then only
systems that have a selfplex can be conscious in that way. So, since other
animals do not generally imitate and cannot have memes, they cannot have the
human kind of self-consciousness. This does not, however, rule out the
possibility that there is something it is like to be a bat, or a rat, or even a robot.
Second, I want to emphasise that consciousness cannot do anything. The
subjectivity, the ‘what it’s like to be me now’ is not a force, or a causal agent,
that can make things happen. When Benjamin poured out his cornflakes he may
have been conscious, but the consciousness played no role in making him do it.
The consciousness simply arose as what it was like to be that human being,
taking those decisions, and doing those actions, and with a memeplex inside
saying ‘I am doing this’. Benjamin may think that if ‘he’ did not consciously
make the decision then it would not happen. I say he would be wrong.
Critics of the analogy between genes and memes often argue that biological
evolution is not consciously directed, whereas social evolution is. Even