Susan Blackmore Quotes

#1. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

Susan Blackmore

#2. I have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.

Susan Blackmore

#3. Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?

Susan Blackmore

#4. Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.

Susan Blackmore

#5. Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

Susan Blackmore

#6. The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.

Susan Blackmore

#7. If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

Susan Blackmore

#8. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

Susan Blackmore

#9. If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

Susan Blackmore

#10. All other species on this planet are gene machines only. They don't imitate at all well; we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well.

Susan Blackmore

#11. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

Susan Blackmore

#12. Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example.

Susan Blackmore

#13. If we take memetics seriously then the 'me' that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine.

Susan Blackmore

#14. 'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don't care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don't think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.

Susan Blackmore

#15. Science has, after all, made some colossal blunders in the past ... Our current materialism and its rejection of the idea of a spirit or soul might be just another great falsity.

Susan Blackmore

#16. Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.

Susan Blackmore

#17. Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

Susan Blackmore

#18. Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

Susan Blackmore

#19. Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore

#20. For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.

Susan Blackmore