“Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.”

— Susan Blackmore

- Susan Blackmore, interview in MungBeing

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Susan Blackmore6

British writer and academic 1951

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“Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we're machines, we're biological machines. But people don't like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don't like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn't matter if we like them or not.”

Susan Blackmore (1951) British writer and academic

"Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes", Wired.com, 2/29/2008

“It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of memes today”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/276449081746915328 (5 December 2012) <br class="br">Twitter <br class="br">Source: The Selfish Gene

“Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 54

“Consciousness is the ultimate Reality; compared with it, all else is illusion.”

Harold W. Percival book Thinking and Destiny

Source: Thinking and Destiny (1946), Ch. 9, Re-Existence, p. 620

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Talking memes with @MaximeBernier”

Lauren Southern (1995) Canadian libertarian commentator

23 March 2017 https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/844905128373170177,

“When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. …behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.6 Threading a New Tapestry

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

“There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

As translated at Gallery of Russian Thinkers … selected by Dmitry Olshansky (2005) http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/nikolay_berdyaev.html <br class="br">Dream and Reality (1949) <br class="br">Context: There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.

“Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

“Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.”

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Susan Blackmore6

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