A review by kahawa
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore

3.0

This had some interesting thoughts, but I felt like Blackmore never quite defined what a meme was in her usage, and her apology for not quite defining it was not quite satisfactory. She also didn't clearly show how memes are truly independent of genes, because I don't think they are, and a lot of what she ascribed to memes could just be complex neurology and biology dependent on genes. If memes are a new separate replicator, how are they different from, say, human bodies, which also replicate? Biologists would say that genes make human bodies in order to make more genes, but Blackmore didn't clearly demonstrate why memes aren't also the creation of genes for making more genes.

I appreciated her discussion at the end about Self. It's an important discussion, and I think she's on the right track. I'm not sure I love her conclusion about how to live in light of the absence of self, but she's probably logically consistent there. If there's no self and no suffering, there's no enjoying. Ergo, nihilism. Food for thought.