The Self and the "I Meme"

The "I" Meme is perhaps the most powerful meme of all: the inescapable impression that the world is experienced in the "first person singular". This seems to be "hard wired' in the brain and this meme finds expression in virtually all human languages, although to varying degrees (It is avoided in Japanese for example).

Attempts to discuss "I" from the "outside" result in a surprisingly varied collection of apparently related memes, such as the "soul", the "mind", the "spirit" and the "self". These are not identical memes and are each somewhat "weaker" than the I meme. We can, after all, experience the world in the first person without accepting the idea of the soul - in fact some schools of Buddhism explicitly deny the existence of the "self" as an illusion. On the other hand, it is common to regard "I" as separable from the body: the "soul".

Much philosophical sleight of hand relies on a constructed description of the first-person in terms of a "junior" meme for the purpose of denying that some other junior meme makes sense. For example, Dennett makes a great show of contrasting his view of the self as "what it feels like to be a brain" with his "straw man" construction of what people "must" mean by the "soul". All he succeeds in doing is convincing us that the Dennett "self" is probably incompatible with the "soul" meme, which doesn't actually prove that the Dennett "self" meme is a "thing". It turns out that the meme of the self-as-brain "explains" (at best) only what Dennett sets out to explain, leaving the vast experience of the first-person on the "cutting room floor".