Against the “Meme Machine”: Normativity, Qualia and “Self”

Abstract

This paper critiques the strong “meme theory” advanced by Susan Blackmore, which claims that all mental phenomena like consciousness, agency, and selfhood can be reduced to the replication and competition of memes. While memetics offers valuable insights into cultural evolution, its explanatory power becomes limited when extended to the philosophy of mind. Two main challenges have developed. First, the problem of normativity: humans evaluate ideas by standards of truth, rationality, and ethics, capacities that cannot be fully explained by replication success alone. Drawing on the notion of innate cognitive structures, the paper argues that evaluative reasoning reveals a layer of mental autonomy beyond memetic causation. Second, the problem of consciousness: eliminative interpretations within strong memetics fail to account for the irreducible reality of subjective experience (qualia). Even if memes construct a “selfplex” that produces an illusory sense of self, the persistence of phenomenological experience resists full reduction. The paper concludes that memetics remains insufficient as a complete theory of mind, despite its insights on cultural theory.