Susan Blackmore Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

The other key to my failures seemed to be belief. I was told that I didn't get results because I didn't believe strongly enough in psi, because I didn't have an open mind!

Susan Blackmore
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
If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

Susan Blackmore
Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

Susan Blackmore
Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.

Susan Blackmore
The way I really think is more like this "I am a scientist. I think the way to the truth is by investigation. I suspect that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and life after death do not exist because I have been looking in vain for them for 25 years. I have been wrong lots of times before and am not afraid of it".

Susan Blackmore
Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?

Susan Blackmore
Science has, after all, made some colossal blunders in the past... Our current materialism and its rejection of the idea of a spirit or soul might be just another great falsity.

Susan Blackmore
The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.

Susan Blackmore
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore