The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson

Author:Phillip E. Johnson [Phillip E. Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Who or What Is the Self?

There is an even more fundamental problem with the robot rebellion, however. Just who is this "we" that is supposed to do the rebelling? Like other reductionists, Dawkins does not believe that there is a single, central self that utilizes the machinery of the brain for its own purposes. The central self that makes choices and then orders the body to act upon them is fundamentally a creationist notion, which reductionists ridicule as the "ghost in the machine," or the homunculus (little person) in the brain. Selfish genes would produce not a free-acting self but a set of mental reactions that compete with each other in the brain before a winner emerges to produce a bodily reaction that serves the overall interests of the genes. In the currently fashionable "computational" theory of the mind, as explicated by mind scientists such as Steven Pinker, the mind is a set of computers that solve specific problems forwarded by the senses. The "self' is at most a kind of coordinating function that prevents the parts from heading off in different directions.

At a joint lecture in 1999 Dawkins asked Pinker, "Am I right to think that the feeling I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a society of mind?" Pinker answered affirmatively that "the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit ... that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction" That hypothetical circuit is all that remains of the illusion of a free-acting self.4

Susan Blackmore takes this logic even further in her book The Meme Machine, which comes with an introduction by Dawkins himself. Dawkins invented the concept of memes to extend Darwinism into the realm of ideas and expression. Memes are analogous to genes because they reproduce by being copied in brains and are altered by copying errors. As Blackmore describes it, "Everything you have learnt by copying it from someone else is a meme. This includes your habit of driving on the left or right, eating beans on toast, wearing jeans, or going on holiday.... Memes are `inherited' when we copy someone else's action, when we pass on an idea or a story, when a book is printed, or when a radio program is broadcast. Memes vary because human imitation is far from perfect. . . . Finally, there is memetic selection. Think of how many things you hear in a day, and how few you pass on to anyone else"

Dawkins originally proposed the meme idea cautiously, but his followers have made it the basis for a complete philosophy of mind. Just as the selfish genes (supposedly) make the body, selfish memes (supposedly also) make the mind.

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