The answer... (updated 2023!)

What follows is an outrageous exercise in selecting half-quotes, which I’ve strung together into two paragraphs, all taken from the final chapter of Sue Blakemore’s The Meme Machine (see January post What are memes? Sue Blackmore explains) However they all appear in the order in which they were written, and I believe provide an accurate summary of the conclusion of the book. Indeed they are the passages and phrases that I have highlighted myself (in yellow!) on my own photocopy of the chapter which I carry in my satchel at all times.

‘..Only when we see a human being as a product of both natural and memetic selection can we bring all aspects of our lives together within one theoretical framework. ..Memes fight it out to get passed on into another brain or book or object, and in the process cultural and mental design comes about. ..There is no need to call on the creative ‘power of consciousness’, ..Free will, like the ‘self’ who has it, is an illusion. ..explanation adds nothing. It is just a story ..after the fact. ..all human actions, whether conscious or not, come from complex interactions between memes, genes and all their products, in complicated environments. ..by consciousness I mean subjectivity - what it’s like being me now. ..not a force, or a causal agent, that can make things happen. ..the most mindless and least conscious of our actions can be imitated just as easily as our most conscious ones. Cultural and social variation is guided by the replicators and their environment, ..new ideas came out of the combinations of the old. ..a combined product of the genes and memes playing out their competition in ..life. ..The creative achievements of human culture are the products of memetic evolution, ..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. ..knowledge is a kind of adaptation. So is foresight. ..comes about by selection, only in this case it is selection between memes.’

‘..the ‘me’ that could do the selecting is itself a memetic construct ..The choices made will all be a product of my genetic and memetic history in a given environment, not of some separate self that can ‘have’ a life purpose and overrule the memes that make it up. ..there is no room for anyone or anything to jump into the evolutionary process and stop it, direct it, or do anything to it. ..and no one watching. ..how can ‘I’ live as though I do not exist, and who would be choosing to do so? ..concentrate on the present moment - all the time - letting go of any thoughts that come up. ..kind of ‘meme weeding’ ..in any moment there is no observable self. ..Ideas will come up but these are all past- and future-orientated; so let them go, come back to the present. Just notice what is happening. ..pay attention to everything equally. ..attention is always being manipulated by things outside yourself rather than controlled by you. ..and created you. ..there is no distinction between myself and the things happening. It is only when ‘I’ want something, respond to something, believe something, decide to do something, that ‘I’ suddenly appear. ..‘I’ in the middle - me in charge, me responsible, me suffering. ..Learning to pay attention to everything equally stops self-related memes from grabbing the attention ..waking from the meme dream. ..accept that the selection of genes and memes will determine the action ..just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves. ..it is odd to observe that actions happen whether or not ‘I’ will them. A great sense of freedom to let so many decisions alone. You do not have to try to do anything or agonise about any decision. ..letting the false self get out of the way, and the decisions make themselves ..the whole process seems to do itself. ..hope and desire are based on the idea of an inner self who must be kept happy ..meet them all with a refusal to get involved ..life really is possible without hope. ..people become more decisive rather than less. ..the selfplex ..it is there for the propagation of the memes that make it up. Its demolition allows more spontaneous and appropriate action. Clever thinking brains, installed with plenty of memes, are quite capable of making sound decisions without a selfplex messing them up. ..you stop inflicting your own desires on the world around you and on the people you meet. ..giving up the illusion of a self in control. ..guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and I become, contrary to expectation, a better neighbour. ..When there is no selfplex, there is no concern about the future of my inner self - whether people like me or whether I did the right thing or not ..free to notice other people more. ..easy to see what another person needs, or how to act in a given situation, ..stopping all the harm we normally do, ..there is no one to rebel.’

..the question of course was; how does cultural and social evolution work?

2023 - time moves on and I no longer carry a physical copy but a digital one on my mobile device, now even more simplified and arguably even more of a distortion of Sue's original!