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Every episode of The Simpsons begins with a slightly different opening sequence, but one image has caught my eye because it is such a perfect illustration of the way we are. Maggie Simpson drives the car. She turns the steering wheel and sounds the horn a barely perceptible instant after her mother, who is really driving. That is what our self does. Our body is really driving, our self is telling itself and anyone who will listen that it is driving. |
The selfplex is one of the central ideas of The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. She describes how scientists have proven that our bodies decide before "we" do, the body has begun to act before the illusion of our self in our brains has made a decision. Our selves decide to do what our bodies are already doing, and if the self does not know why it is doing that it has to make up an explanation and stick to it. So Maggie Simpson turns the wheel right when the car turns right, not the other way round. But Maggie knows she turned right because she chose to. She turned because she needed to maintain the illusion of control, for Maggie it is a game, for the selfplex it is a fight for survival. This is a hard idea to grasp but once you have understood it the world is never the same again. For me the reality of the selfplex is now a central part of my philosophy.
We are, as those bards The Bloodhound Gang put it, nothing but mammals. That is the central reality of our lives, it is also heresy for almost all religions and belief systems. As soon as I had become an atheist I was ready for this idea. I knew that I was just a brain in a body. I never for one moment thought about the idea of having a soul as something separate, or at least I never thought that such an idea could have any validity. I wish that I had been able to learn of the selfplex at this time, but the idea was still more than twenty years away in the future.
I know now that I am an illusion. I is the selfplex, a co-adapted meme complex, the first and most powerful one. The co-adapted meme complex in whose interests my body will work. Bodies evolved because of selection pressure on bodies working through to influence gene frequencies. The selfplex and other memes have hijacked the survival machines of the genes and made them into meme machines. We work for our memes and our genes, we have two masters.
But so what?
What is the implication of this profound insight? How should we behave differently as a result? When I first read Sue Blackmore's book I was left with a very deep puzzle. Where was the link between the knowledge of the selfplex and any implications for behaviour. I didn't get it. I read about her Buddhist style way of living, letting her body decide which way to turn, which choice to make. I couldn't see the link between knowing the selfplex and then trying to fight it. It was not there in the book. There was a leap from description to prescription, the intervening step was not there. I suppose that is the way it should be. Decisions are not really made by selves anyway. We know therefore we have acted, before we have got around to formulating the reasons for our decision.
I see this self-knowledge (or should that be selfless-knowledge?) as a liberation. We don't need to work on decisions, they will be made anyway. We are nothing but the temporary alliance of genes and memes, all our decisions will be in their interests, just let them get on with it. Now I have got it. Now I understand, I did not understand as I started the page, or even as I started the last paragraph. Who says I am set in my beliefs! I have often said that the best way to understand something is to try and explain it to somebody else, teaching teaches teachers. I have just had another personal growth experience, I feel my understanding of Life, The Universe and Everything has just taken another leap forward. My mind filled with the image of one of those interminable bar charts you see when downloading or installing software, I pictured the bar leaping across from 22% to 29% in one jerk. Thank you Sue, better late than never, I get it!
It is easy to understand. Just give your self a break. The car will turn the corner whether Maggie turns the wheel or whether she just looks out of the window and enjoys the ride. And when the horn sounds Maggie need not bash the button, the horn has sounded, that will not change. That analogy breaks down because Maggie and her mother are separate, while in you there is a brain-body and a selfplex, they are both you. The brain-body drives, the selfplex turns the wheel, but it doesn't have to.
The following is part of an e-mail I sent recently in which I stumbled on another wonderful analogy of the selfplex:-
Memes are not real, they are an abstraction. They have no physical entity. Just like "crime" or "the marginal propensity to save" or "the Protestant work ethic", all these things are abstract, but still realities in their own way.
Memes cannot choose to be replicated, they either have the properties to make themselves good replicators or they lack them. If they lack them they cease to be memes and become what they were before, sounds, words or marks on a page.
We do have a choice as to the memes we spread, the ideas we spread. We don't exist though, in the way most Homo sapiens think "we" exist. The self is a memetic construct. An elaborate lie to which we are the audience and the liar. The self is a construct. We are constantly telling ourselves what we are going to do after the fact. It is as though we were sat in two cinema seats, one part of us pretended to understand the plot of the film and was explaining it to his companion despite the fact that neither of them understood the language in which the film was produced. And the final twist in the tale is that both members of the audience, the script writer, the only actor and the director are the same person. We, the self, is the confused habitual liar who is pretending to understand the plot. The body is the actor, the memes wrote the script and the genes direct. WHOA! How's that for an set of analogies!
(But who was the self talking to in the other seat?) Shut up, all analogies break if you push them too far.
Despite that self-denying stuff I think we can get to drive and choose the memes we spread. We are the vehicles, the bodies, the brains, we are the things that actually do things, it is time we started doing things for our reasons not for the good of genes and memes all the time. But is that not impossible? I think I better go to bed my brain hurts.
On second thoughts it is impossible to drive. The best we can do is to cultivate the memes in our meme gardens and select the ones they wanted us to select ;-)
In the light of these comments I would like to clarify my thinking a little further.
The self is not an illusion. It is an abstraction. I am an abstraction. I am real, but not as real as my body.
I exist in a meaningful way, in the way that crime exists, or society or Belgium. I exist because I am recognized to exist. Most importantly I exist because I claim I exist. I is the same thing as the self, the will, consciousness. All these words describe the same thing in different ways.
An elephant can be large and heavy and grey and a mammal all at the same time, no contradiction is implied. The self can be my memories and my desires and my current sensations. The self is the current status of the programs running in my brain. I am made up of several disparate systems of subconscious thought. I am my memory and my memes, my senses, my desires, urges, whims and will.
I exist, even if I am too slow to be in direct conscious control of my body. The will that I am does not will every move that I make. Those moves are undertaken by faster systems which are also every bit as much me as the pondering giant that talks in my head.
As to whether I should pander to the illusion of decision making that is not too important, decisions will be made either way, I can either ignore them or get involved with them.
Is it better to be aware of the fragility of your self, and your lack of power? Or try to hold on to the illusion of will? I really don't know. All I can say is that I do not feel overly tempted by the prospect of meditation and the pursuit of non-existence. That seems to run counter to the tide of what I perceive around me. Will should struggle towards complexity not perfect simplicity. Is that me or my rational progress memes talking? Is there a difference?