The Meme Machine

240 THE MEME MACHINE
But, as we have seen, this view of self does not hold up. There is no one inside
there to do the doing – other than a bunch of memes.
I am not saying that there is no creativity. New books are written, new
technologies invented, new gardens laid out, and new films produced. But the
generative power behind this creativity is the competition between replicators,
not a magical, out-of-nowhere power such as consciousness is often said to be.
The creative achievements of human culture are the products of memetic
evolution, just as the creative achievements of the biological world are the
products of genetic evolution. Replicator power is the only design process we
know of that can do the job, and it does it. We do not need conscious human
selves messing about in there as well.
Of course selves are not irrelevant. Far from it. By virtue of their
organisation and persistence, selfplexes are powerful memetic entities that affect
the behaviour of the people who sustain them, and of all those who come into
contact with them. But as far as creativity is concerned selves can often do more
harm than good, for creative acts often come about in a state of selflessness, or
loss of self-consciousness, when the self seems to be out of the way. Artists,
writers and runners often say they are at their best when acting spontaneously
and without self-consciousness. So selves have effects but not as the originators
of conscious creativity.
Human foresight
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of
biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the ‘blind
watchmaker’ of natural selection with the real human one. ‘A true watchmaker
has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections,
with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in
mind’ (Dawkins 1986, p. 5). I think this distinction is strong.
There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural
one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels,
and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with
which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying
the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary
processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they
produce what looks like foresight.
As Plotkin (1993) points out, knowledge (whether in humans, animals, or
plants) is a kind of adaptation. So is foresight. When a daffodil bulb starts into