Kenan Malik opened his introduction by explaining that he intended to ask the same question that Sue Blackmore did; ‘What is it to be human?’ but that he was going to come to a very different conclusion. He started with the question, 'how did the meme of the meme first evolve?' About 30 years ago, Richard Dawkins wrote the book The Selfish Gene in which he pulled together a number threads of contemporary Darwinism. Dawkins argued that individuals come and go, but genes are potentially immortal. Their only purpose is to survive, hence Dawkin’s description of them as selfish. Humans, like all animals are, as he put it, lumbering robots created by their genes. But Dawkins also acknowledged that humans are not simply lumbering robots created by their genes but also active agents.

There is a passage in The Selfish Gene, which is strangely ignored by both sides of the debate and it is quite an eloquent passage, it says we are built as gene machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth, humans, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicaters. Malik asked how this can be; if we are built as gene machines, how do we possess the power to turn against our creators? This is where the idea of the meme came in; an idea that Dawkins introduced to try and at least partly answer that question.

Malik recapped what a meme is; a cultural replicator. The only aim of a meme, like that of a gene, is to survive and reproduce. As a unit of cultural transmission a meme explains, or seems to explain, how we can turn against tyranny of the gene. Memes take us beyond simply being gene machines and allow us to think of human beings as cultural beings, distinctive from any other animals, but also to have a mechanistic explanation of why humans are distinctive from any other animals. In other words it seems to provide a scientific answer to the question of how to understand this special character of being human. However, Malik argued, it does not provide this at all. Far from solving the riddle of human specialness, the notion of the meme actually makes it far more mysterious in a very profound way. For Malik, insofar as memetics is true, it is saying something pretty trivial; insofar as it is saying something profound, it is profoundly untrue.

To understand this Malik invited the audience look more closely at the problem of human specialness. He thought that most people in the room would probably accept that humans are animals; evolved beings with evolved brains,evolved bodies and evolved minds and that most people would also accept that in some fashion we are distinct from all other animals in the way that Richard Dawkins talked about. So how do we reconcile those two views?

One of the paradoxes of natural science is that its success and understanding nature has created problems in its understanding of human nature. At the heart of the scientific methodology is a view of nature and of natural organisms as machines, not because ants or apes work like TVs or cars, but because like all machines they appear to lack self consciousness and will.

Humans however are not these kinds of disenchanted creatures. We possess, or at least we believe we possess, purpose in agency, consciousness and qualities that science has expunged from the rest of nature. Humans are both objects of nature and subjects that can, at least to some extent, shape their own fate. We are biological beings and under the purview of biological and physical laws, but we are also reflective, rational, social beings that can design ways of easing the constraints of biological and physical laws.

Science has expunged agency from the natural world, but agency is a crucial aspect of the human world. So how do we understand it scientifically? One answer is to say that agency is an illusion, something that natural selection has designed us to believe in, not because it is true but because it is useful. The neuroscientist Colin Blakemore expresses this well when he says, ‘When we feel ourselves to be in control of an action, that feeling itself is the product of our brain whose machinery has been designed on the basis of its functional utility by means of natural selection. We think we’re in charge but in reality there is no self that can take charge, there is simply a machinery, a link of a set of cause agents going back to the Big Bang.’ In effect we cannot rebel against our creators - we just imagine that we can.

For Malik there are two problems with this argument. The first is it does not actually address the problem of human specialness, it just says it does not exist, which is not the same as answering the question! The second, more profound, problem which is that, by its own criteria, this argument provides us with no reason for believing in it. From an evolutionary point of view, truth is contingent. Darwinian processes are driven by the need, not to ascertain truth, but to survive and reproduce. Of course survival often requires organisms to have correct facts about the world. A zebra that thought lions were friendly or a chimp that loved the smell of rotting food would not survive for very long. However, although natural selection often ensures that organisms possess correct truths or facts about the world, it does not have to. The argument that consciousness and agency are illusions implanted in our minds by natural selection because they are useful to us depends on the idea that evolution can select for untruths about the world because they are useful in the evolution process. So if our cognitive dispositions were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing which are true ones or false ones. Thus the logic of the kind of argument put forward by Colin Blakemore is that we cannot rely on our own judgements; If we are simply animals in the way he talks about, there is no way we can have any confidence in the claim that we are only animals in the way he talks about.

According to Malik we are only able to do science and have a notion of truth because we can transcend our evolutionary heritage: to act as subjects rather than simply as biological objects. Logically the same problem affects the meme. At the heart of memetics is not a claim about the unit of culture or imitation, but a statement about human agency or the lack of it.

So Blackmore has argued that, instead of thinking of our ideas as our own creations working for us, we should think of them as autonomous selfish memes working only to get themselves copied. There is, she says, no such thing as agency or will, only a brain processing information memes being copied or not. This raises the question 'who is this person sitting there telling us all this?' Not a self called Susan Blackmore but a collection of memes; she has written that I am simply a story. So what you have is a set of stories that wrote a book called The Meme Machine and stands here and tells us a story and a set of stories that sits here listening to the stories told by a set of stories standing here. This seems a very bizarre world to Malik; one in which stories write and listen and read each other. Memetics might have expelled the ghost from the machine, but that ghost seems to have gone out in the world and multiplied so that the world is now stuffed full of these disembodied spirits or stories which act on our behalf.

Malik asked the question, are these stories true? Could they be true? Well Sue Blackmore has suggested in The Meme Machine that she defends the idea that science is more truthful than religion. But why should we believe her. The ‘I’ that believes that, according to Blackmore herself, does not exist. It is a fiction. Both science and religion are sets of memes, so why is one more truthful than the other? One may be more selfish and better at replicating, but the notion of truth simply does not exist in the memetic world except as another meme. Thus we return to the problem that we had with Colin Blakemore’s argument: without a conscious self, without an agent, there can be no such thing as truth. Far from placing the understanding of what it is to be human on a sound scientific footing, memetics and similar theories call into question the very notion of scientific truth. In any case they cannot answer the question we started with, which is what makes humans special from a scientific viewpoint.

That full Richard Dawkins quote from The Selfish Gene is this, ‘we are built are gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators’, but how can we if there is no ‘we’ that can do that turning.

It seems to Malik that the meme is not so much a unit of cultural transmission as a kind of species of wishful thinking. It is an attempt to wish away the difficulty that human agency poses scientific thought and scientific explanation. What we end up with is a surreal world where humans are zombies and ideas think for themselves. Thus Malik called for a bit of reality, not to the world of ghosts and memes, but to the world of humans and ideas. He argued that we should start thinking what is it that allows human beings to have this dual character, which no other animals have and to think what kinds of scientific explanations are necessary to begin to understand why it is that humans are both subjects and objects.

Raymond Tallis opened by saying he felt the discussion was a bit of a bullying since Kenan Malik and he had decided between them that they would share the division of labour in disagreeing with Susan Blackmore. His argument would overlap Malik's, perhaps proving Blackmore’s theory that we are just memetic replicators.

For Tallis the problem with the meme theory is that it represents an attempt to encage human beings entirely within a quasi-Darwinian framework without denying that there is a cultural dimension to humans that cannot be mapped onto organic nature. Thus the notion of the gene, the unit of biological translation which lies at the heart of Darwinism, is supplemented with that of the meme, the unit of cultural translation. And at the heart of Blackmore's memetics is a critique of the notion of the conscious human agent, which Tallis thinks is as profound as that which would follow from the assumption that all our behaviour is determined by our genes. He finds it deeply disturbing.

Memes are not something we consciously acquire or consciously act upon. They are self replicating entities that, without consulting our brains or without the active consent of our minds, copy themselves into our brains and thus inhabit and parasitize our minds. We might call this the ‘ditto head’ theory of consciousness. For Tallis it is very important to emphasise the passivity of the individual who takes on board the meme and also the personality of the meme. This is something that Kenan Malik has emphasised. In fact, with respect to both the acquisition and the expression of memes in our behaviour, we are mere sites of impersonal mechanisms. Conscious agents have got nothing to do with it. Unlike Blackmore, Tallis finds this idea depressing. For him this means abandoning the notion of free will and if you take away the concept of free will from him then you take away his meaning. Tallis thus raised the question whether the meme account of mind is plausible. Does it capture what it is like to be a human being? He does not think it does. To illustrate why he wanted to test the notion of a mind or brain or a human as a meme machine by considering an utterly banal everyday unit of human behaviour, which one might expect to be particularly amenable to thinking of in memetic terms; a sufficient critique of meme theory requires showing how ordinary behaviour rather than unusual behaviour cannot be captured by it, showing how it is wrong not just about Beethoven in his most inspired moments, but about Raymond Tallis in his very many, very ordinary moments.

Thus he focused on the simple act of saying ‘hello’ to someone when you encounter them. This is a highly stereotypical activity, and raises the question whether it is something that is simply copied from brain to brain as opposed to something that we genuinely utter as a deliberative and voluntary act. At first sight, saying ‘hello’ seems a classic example of neo-mechanical memetic behaviour into which nothing personal is inserted.

When Tallis sees the potential recipient of his ‘hello’ some way off, this gives hima time to make a series of decisions. The first is whether he should greet them or not, the second is how he should respond to them. Should he respond with something middle of the road like ‘hello’ or something more informal such as ‘hi’ or more formal such as ‘good morning.’ His decision whether and how to respond will depend on whether he recognises the potential recipient and ‘recognise’ here has a variety ofmeanings. There are degrees or levels of recognition: seeing that the object approaching me is a human being; seeing whether he is a familiar or unfamiliar human being. If the individual is a stranger he might still greet him or her, though this will depend on many circumstances. For example, he may be more likely to greet a male of his own age than an unaccompanied child by itself as he does not want to frighten the child. He might greet a middle aged man rather than a solitary female, aware of the need not to be seen to be invading her personal space or worse. Thus his classification of a stranger as an appropriate recipient of hisgreeting depends on an enormous number of highly personal considerations. This is only the beginning. There are many more things specific to him of which he is explicitly conscious, which determine whether and how he greets the approaching person: the sort of place they are in and hia perception of the kind of place it is; What inner or outer business is occupying him; how grumpy, well or ill-disposed he is feeling towards my fellow beings and indeed to the particular person coming towards him. All these factors are highly personal, things of which he is aware. For example the joy he is feeling at having just secured an MRC grant for his research may alter the extent to which he is likely to greet people or his awareness that this place is lonely because he read recently in the newspaper that somebody was assaulted there. Many other such factors may have an influence on whether or not he says hello.

The number of considerations and their application is crucially influenced by so many things of which he is explicitly and uniquely aware that this demonstrates the non-automaticity of his response. His greeting is not simply the unconscious following of rules and such rules as there are could not be obeyed by someone who did not explicitly feel them. The complexity that attends the greeting of classifiable strangers is only the beginning of the story. Most people he greets fall under single member categories of their unique selves. He recognises exactly who it is coming towards him. It is not a middle aged business man, but Fred whom I met on a train a few years ago after a gap of 20 years. They had been school friends and their encounter is a unique interaction between unique histories. It is this that explains why when they meet he says “hello” in a certain way; “hello” the way they used to say it when they parodied the posh people whom they liked to mock. By this they signal their loyalty to a unique shared past.

Thus Tallis's point is that one “hello” is not a simple copy of another “hello” whose variations are only there by accident, the product of mere accidental variation. No meme machine could operate in the way that he deliberately and consciously operates even when he says something that appears to be a mere linguistic reflex such as “hello”. It would be impossible to specify the rules because they are so complex thus it is not reasonable to decribe this simple behaviour as rule governed except insofar as it is ruled by the individual, in this case Raymond Tallis.

In making this point Tallis was drawing attention to something that is often overlooked, the fact that our actions, unlike those of beasts who are organisms rather than embodied subjects such as humans are, are rooted in what might be called 'first person’s soil.' This soil underpins the world out of which and in which we act and it nourishes specific meanings of our actions and indeed occasions and explains them.

Tallis illustrated this finally with a more complex example. he invited the audience to consider Sue Blackmore's attendance at this event to participate in the debate about memes. She could not have got here at this precise place and time as agreed many months ago by surfing on a sea of memes, any more than she could have got here by means of a chain of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, tropisms, the instincts of a homing pigeon or an unfolding delirium. All the many millions of actions necessary to get here to arrive prepared for the debate would not be possible without their being trans-illuminated by a clear intention based upon an abstract goal precisely envisaged and energised by deliberateness, informed by a specific and complex understanding of the meaning of her supposed meme driven activities.

Most of the things that we do, we have to know what we are doing, why we are doing it and why we should want to do them. They are an expression of a large number of choices that reach into other choices we have made. They are embedded in and indeed inseparable from our sense of our self. Thus his final point is we cannot understand our freedom of choice, our unique trajectories without understanding first person being, what Tallis describes as the existential intuition; the sense that I am this that is unique to humans and has become enormously elaborated in the formation of selves. This intuition which accompanies us all our waking hours and which does not supplant the mechanisms upon which it is based, is the foundation of agency. It lies at the origin of our distance from the passive flow of events in our minds and the difference between dreaming, daydreaming and planning, between somnambulating and walking, between reacting and initiating actions.Our knowledge in this separates Darwinism from Darwinosis or Darwinitis, which is unacceptable.