34 Quotes by Susan Blackmore

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.

What is the difference between the mind resting in tranquility and the mind moving in thought?

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.

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.

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.

People get depressed and get attracted to different types of memes. You can trace some of this to how the biological hierarchy is set up.

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

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.

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.