Julian Baggini is taken on the trip of a lifetime

There comes a point in a good interview when a little warning light flashes in the back of your head reminding you that the more you go on, the more difficult it is going to be to cut the material down into a suitable length for an article. And if an interesting interviewee is a double-edged sword, the Sue Blackmore is a veritable Excalibur.

So here I am, going through nearly 13,000 intelligent, vivacious, words, covering dalliance with the paranormal; hippy-dippy youth; zen; scepticism; and the nature of reason, consciousness, and free will, wondering how the hell I’m going to chop it down to size. A good start would be to fewer of my words, and more of Blackmore’s.

Blackmore doesn’t remember a specifically philosophical awakening because she;s never seen the philosophical questions as being separate form the others that have engaged her. “I remember as a quite small child being really worried about heat,” she recalls over tea made by her son Jolyon in her Bristol home. “It’s one of those flash-bulb memories that you have – I can place it physically but not in time. I couldn’t think what heat was. Then I thought. maybe it’s not a stuff at all, maybe it’s things moving. I was walking around the pond at the time in my parents’ house and I think I was holding something hot and I remember thinking ‘This hot think is wriggling more and then it touches my hand and I’m feeling the wriggling.” I probably picked that up from somewhere else I don’t claim to have reinvented it. In a way you wouldn’t call that philosophy, you’d call it science, but that was very young and I was just worried about the nature of everything.”

“We did have philosophy lessons in the sixth form which I quite enjoyed but it was mostly logic. We learned about the Epicureans and it interested me.

“It never occurred to me to do philosophy as a degree. I wanted to do science of some kind and I chose physiology and psychology, but certainly when I went into psychology the questions that really interested me were the fundamental ones. And of course you hit again and again on the mind-body problem. How is all this stuff I’m learning about rats and neurons, and chopping them up running them in mazes, turn into mental experience?”

In fact. Blackmore came within a whisker of formally studying philosophy.

“When I went to Oxford I went there to do PPP: Philosophy, Physiology and Psychology, and it was only when I got there that I realised you had to choose two on the first day. So I chose, with difficulty, physiology and psychology, and didn’t do philosophy. So from then on I always felt I was inferior and inadequate compared to anyone who had studied philosophy properly.”

Pretty soon, Blackmore was going in a very different direction, one which would probably have been grounds for being kicked out of the hyper-rationalist world of Oxford philosophy.

“When I got to Oxford I joined a load of societies and the Society for Psychical Research was just one of them. It just happened that there was only one member left. He had long, curly brown hair, smoked dope and was really far out man and I thought he was so cool, so fab, so with it, whatever we said in 1970. Whatever it was, he was that. And so I started up the society with him again and I got obsessed.

“A few weeks in we had had a ouija board session for a couple of hours and we were all kind of blurgh, and we smoked some dope so we were even more blurgh, and I hadn’t been sleeping much at all because I’d been enjoying burning the candle at both ends, so I was even more blurgh, and I had this extraordinary, vivid, bright, realer-than-real experience in which I seemed to be travelling around the world, entering different realms, in a way which was more vivid, more realistic than anything I had ever experienced in waking life. Now I think, wow, what an incredible experience, how wonderful. And I shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusions I did, which were that it proves I’ve got a spirit or a soul, that means I can live after death, that proves I’ve got telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, the whole lot.”

And so Sue Blackmore entered her long parapsychology years, recounted in her autobiographical In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist. Many would think this a highly embarrassing blot on the CV, and Blackmore is refreshingly open about how misguided she was.

“I think I was pretty flaky. I mean pictures from that time show me in big dangly things with all bits on and wearing headbands and going around going ‘Far out man’ and I joined a witches coven and trained, trained as a witch. I got involved in theosophy and studying the astral planes and the etheric plane and the causal plane and the amunets. I can’t quite recite them all now. I went around Oxford thinking that all the people who were doing sensible experiments were, they don’t realise the great truth that I’ve stumbled across that really there’s cache of records out there and memory isn’t located the brain at all. Memory is all out there. I mean those are all flaky ideas.”

But at the same time, there is a sense in which we all base our lives on what seems most real to us and Blackmore’s journey demonstrated two great intellectual virtues: the willingness to investigate an idea regardless of its fashionability and to test them with all your powers of reasoning and evidence. Hasn’t that given her an edge over people who have followedomore conventional paths?

“Oh yeah, absolutely. Because I can so much more identify with, or sympathise with people stuck with that, because there’s so much natural about those sort of ideas. It feels quite natural that I should be able to have telepathy with Jolyon because after all we’re related, and it feels quite natural the thought that I’m not going to snuff out like a candle now, I’m going to carry on.

“What it takes to get out of these very easy beliefs is actually quite hard and it requires intelligence, interest, applications, discipline to get yourself out of it, and for most people it’s not the central thing they want to make an effort on, so they don’t. So I understand how they stick with astrology or whatever it is. I think it’s dangerous and not helpful to them that they do, but I do understand it.

“The two major ways you can get out of it are, one, theoretical, logical, thinking it all through; and the other is looking at evidence. I did both, but primarily it was the evidence that made me change my mind.”

Has that left her with the zeal of the covert, who knows with conviction where the line is to drawn between science and pseudo science, or has she rather been left with a sense of the difficulty of drawing such a line?

“I can’t say I’ve got my own absolutely watertight solutions for the demarcation problems. That reminds me of the time when I was really used as a sort of mascot by CSICOP, The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, who were absolutely thrilled when they discovered me. You know here is this woman, which is helpful, because they’re all sceptical crusty old men. So, and they were looking for a token woman for their committees anyway. But to find one who used to be a believer and has actually done parapsychology and then seen the light and come over to the truth and, you know, and all of that was very helpful to them.

“So I became quite a darling of the sceptics movement for quite a while, and had a lot of trouble with that. Over there in America, I’m on the executive committee CSICOP. Over here in London, I’m on the executive council of the Society for Psychical Research, the believer one. Both these organisations have absolutely compatible ends. The STR’s, I expect I can recite you from their 1882 journal, ‘to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis.’

“Now isn’t that just saying the same thing in Victorian language, so of course I could belong to both. But people say ‘How can you belong to both, you’re the enemy.’”

Paradoxically, it is even the case that the sceptics were more dogmatic.

“There’s more scope in the STR for sceptics than there is scope in the sceptics organisation for believers. In a sort of roundabout way of answering your question about the demarcation problem, I do have a feeling for it. The people and science that I respect has a certain kind of open mindedness that I’ve come to appreciate. I appreciate the old thing that if your mind is too open it’s like a skip and everyone throws their rubbish in. I appreciate what it means for people to be utterly close minded, and I’ve had enough experience of people of all over the place to have a sort of intuitive feel for what I think is open mindedness, where people have strong opinions. They have theories that they believe are true, they have preferred ideas, but they are actually deep down interested in the evidence and they will change their minds if the evidence comes along and suggests that they should change their mind.

“So that, that’s what to me is important about the difference between pseudo science where people, just believe what they want to and make it all up as they go along, whatever and real science which goes forward because of the evidence.”

These experiences have also led her to be more wary of bandying around the word “reason” to show which side you’re on.

“They quite often say ‘We should replace whatever it is with reasoning,’ or ‘We should depend on reasons alone.’ There were various things that I refused to sign up to that CSICOP did because it emphasised reason above all else, as though there are only two things in the world, rubbish and reason, and that’s not true.

“I mean falling in love is not reasonable. Some people love poetry. It doesn’t very often do anything much for me, but that sort of feeling for beauty, that’s, that’s human, it’s important, it’s a part of our life. Those emotional aesthetic, artistic responses are not reasons, but nor are they unreason or pseudo science. What I’m trying to say is the world is not divided into pseudo science and reason. If it’s divided, it’s divided into maybe pseudo science and science and a billion other things. There is a danger that these groups want to get rid of everything that isn’t based on reason, and I think that just leads to kind of human death really. But if someone put a stupid argument in front of me, and an argument based in reason, I’ll go for the reason yes.”

As a scientist, Blackmore has good empirical evidence to value more than rationality in the narrow sense. Intuition, for example, plays an important role on scientific progress.

“There’s plenty of scientific evidence to show this. There can be problems that are too complex to be solved by rational means, and yet we can solve them intuitively, presumably with some kind of neural map sort of whatever, and we do that all the time. Now what’s wrong with that is if you just rely on it. It doesn’t really matter where you get the hypothesis from but you then have to find out whether they’re comfirmable and, and test them. I mean I’m not, I’m not a full on Popperian but I think that, that general model is right from that point of view.”

If all this talk of solutions to problems popping into consciousness without any overt thinking going on sounds a bit zen, then that’s no surprise, since Blackmore has been practising Zen meditation for over 20 years.

“I stumbled across Zen in my flaky phase,” she says but it was not until 1986 that she started to practice it regularly. “A group of us ran a conference called ‘Eastern Approaches to Mind and Self’ which was mainly Buddhists and psychologists, and they all started talking about mindfulness. And I got obsessed with what on earth mindfulness is. It’s meant to be being in the present: well, surely I am in a present, if I’m not where am I, what am I doing anyway? That sort of made me inspired to try and practise it more for myself and once I started doing that, I found meditation slightly easier, and somehow or another in the midst of that I simply decided I was going to meditate every day and I’ve not hardly missed a day since then, which is more than twenty years now.

“So that’s how my whole Zen thing came about and it seemed to me for the first, well most of the time I’ve been doing that, to be quite separate from my science. But it sort of began to dawn on me, I suppose maybe ten years ago it really began to dawn on me that actually the things Zen was saying are absolutely the same kind of things that science is saying. That there isn’t a separate self and it doesn’t go on forever and consciousness the way we think of it is an illusion and free will is an illusion and all of these things seemed to be so clear in Zen. So the two have come together and now they, they really seem to me to be the same thing.”

Not that she has adopted all the belief structures that go along with many forms of Buddhism. “I never studied it technically. Zen is really just sit down, shut up and get on with it yourself. In other areas of Buddhism there are twenty seven types of this, loops of that, and eternal cycle of the eight wotsits, and I just think, why eight?”

In recent years, Blackmore has become closely associated with the idea of memes: units of culture which spread and replicate in some way analogous to genes. Dawkins proposed the idea quite causally in his The Selfish Gene and Blackmore has been one the thinkers to run with it the hardest, in partoycalr with her book The Meme Machine. So what is the state of memetics right now?

“I would say not quite on death’s door, But it’s been there several times and might come back to life. But, I remain quite hopeful for two reasons.

“One, to me it makes so much more sense of the world than any other view that I’ve come across. It makes sense of the massive difference between humans and every other species on the planet in a cognate sense it seems to make sense of what happens to the whole planet, that we’ve landed ourselves with global warming, we’re killing ourselves off. No other species could do that because they don’t have a second replicator that’s capable of sucking up all the resources.

“But the other thing that makes me hopeful is that here and there in different fields, in translation studies, in linguistic learning, in robotics, in artificial language studies, in studies of brain size and how the brain was forced to become so much bigger, in anthropology: all over the place, there are little bits are coming that confirm central ideas that I put in The Meme Machine. I mean it seemed to happen quite a lot and seemed to fit together to me, but not to anybody else. So I just think that with these things keeping on happening, at some point people go ‘Ah, perhaps it’s helpful to call these memes.’”

However, there are also pretty good reasons for being pessimistic. “I sometimes think it’s really weird that I tend to have faith in the ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood when, when I’ve written all about memes which are spread for other reasons that the truth. The meme meme is not a good meme at the moment.”

Isn’t one problem that it memetics is not a strictly natural science, so could you ever have a study of memetics which was purely using natural science methods?

“Yeah, why not, you’ve used epidemiological techniques. I suppose, I mean you can borrow techniques from all over the place. I mean if a meme is any information that is copied by a person in imitation, or indeed through a book or a machine or anything, it’s just information, we’ve got plenty of paradigms and methods for studying imitation flow and copying and so on.”

But it’s going to be a bit messy isn’t it, because you’ve got two…

“Oh horribly messy. But that’s totally different from saying in principle it will be something outside of natural science methods It is probably a major reason why people don’t want to do it, because it’s too messy. But that’s still natural science.”

There’s so much more we talked about, mainly about the philosophy of consciousness. But since she has already written two excellent books on the subject, in the grand scheme of things you’ll not be deprived by the omission. Her Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction is one of the best introductions to the philosophy of mind I’ve read, while the collection of interviews Conversations on Consciousness is not only a brilliant overview of the many different positions in the subject, it also allows the personalities of Blackmore and her interviewees to shine through.

“God knows how you’re going to turn this into something useful,” she said to me at one point in our conversation. The answer is, I hope, by ruthlessly leaving lots of good material out. For someone who believes the self is an illusion, Blackmore is an incredibly distinctive individual whose presence seemingly expands to fill all available space. Right now, her time is up, but I’m sure there’s plenty more to come.

Julian Baggini is editor of tpm.