British psychologist, born 1951

Susan Blackmore

Open the fridge and the light is always on. Ask yourself whether you are conscious and the answer is always yes. In both cases the looking may be what makes it so, and the steady stream of experience we think we have may be a grand illusion.

The view

Blackmore trained in psychology and physiology at Oxford and took a doctorate in parapsychology, expecting to find evidence for the paranormal. Years of experiments turned up none, and she became one of its best-known sceptics. Since then she has written about consciousness, the self and out-of-body experiences, and taught the subject through her textbook Consciousness: An Introduction, now in its third edition with Emily Troscianko. She has also practised Zen meditation for decades, and uses it as a way of looking hard at her own experience.

Her conclusion, reached by both routes, is that consciousness is not what it seems. We feel we have a continuous stream of rich experience, with a self at the centre watching it go by. Blackmore thinks both the stream and the watcher are illusions. She was one of the commentators in the 2016 Journal of Consciousness Studies symposium on Frankish's illusionism, and in recent conversation with him she has suggested that what it is like to be conscious is simply what it is like to be a model that the brain builds of itself.

The argument

Whenever we ask whether we are conscious, we are, so we conclude that we always are. Perhaps the asking is what makes it so. After Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (2005)

The fridge is the clearest way into it. A child might wonder whether the light inside stays on when the door is shut. Every time she opens the door to check, it is on, so the evidence all points one way. But the evidence could never have pointed the other way, because checking turns the light on. Try it below.

Blackmore suggests the mind works the same way. Ask "Am I conscious now?" and you find that you are, with a vivid scene before you. But the question itself may switch on the very thing it asks about. Between askings, the brain is busy with many parallel processes, none of them a show in an inner theatre. A tidy stream of experience may be something we put together after the fact, each time we look back.

Her own experiments support this. In 1995 she and her colleagues showed people a picture, moved it slightly while their eyes jumped to a new point, and changed something in it. People often failed to notice even large changes. If we really held a rich, detailed picture of the world in mind, we would spot the difference at once. This was one of the first studies of what is now called change blindness, which you can try in the Lab. The world seems rich in detail because the detail is out there, in the world, ready whenever we look, not because we keep a copy of it inside. She calls our belief in the inner picture the grand illusion.

The self gets the same treatment. In The Meme Machine (1999) Blackmore took Richard Dawkins's idea of memes, ideas and habits that spread by imitation as genes spread by reproduction, and turned it on the self. The idea of a lasting "I" who has experiences, makes decisions and owns beliefs is, on her view, a highly successful cluster of memes, which she calls the selfplex. It thrives because beliefs that are attached to a self get defended and passed on. But there is nobody in there for it to describe.

Where she meets Dennett

Very closely, and she says so. Blackmore's grand illusion is Dennett's attack on the Cartesian Theatre followed through: no finish line in the brain where everything comes together for an inner audience, only multiple drafts, with the impression of a single stream assembled when we probe. Both treat change blindness as evidence that the visual world is far less fully represented than it seems. Both are memeticists: Dennett championed memes in Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, arguing that a human mind is what you get when memes restructure a brain, and Blackmore built the idea into a full theory. Both deny that there is a hard problem left once the illusion is explained. She interviewed him for Conversations on Consciousness (2005), a book of her interviews with leading researchers on the mind.

Where she parts

Blackmore goes further. Dennett calls the self a centre of narrative gravity: an abstraction, but a real and useful one, like a centre of gravity in physics. Blackmore is readier to say that the self simply does not exist. The difference shows most clearly over free will. Dennett defended a free will "worth wanting", compatible with determinism, and wrote two books about it. Blackmore says she gave up believing in free will altogether, and that life goes on perfectly well without it.

They also differ on method. Dennett distrusted introspection: he treated what people say about their experience as data to be explained, not as a report of the facts. Blackmore agrees that introspection misleads us, but she thinks disciplined first-person practice, like meditation, can show the illusion from the inside, as the stream breaks up under close attention. Dennett was never persuaded that sitting and looking could settle much.

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Further reading

• Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005; 2nd edn 2017): the fridge light, and the best short way in.
• Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Consciousness: An Introduction (Routledge, 3rd edn, 2018): the textbook.
• Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999): memes and the selfplex.
• Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2005): interviews, Dennett and Chalmers among them.
• Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness (Oneworld, 2011): ten questions put to her own experience in meditation.
• Susan Blackmore, "There Is No Stream of Consciousness", Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (2002).