Against the “Meme Machine”: Normativity, Qualia and “Self”
Arts, Culture and Language December 19, 2025 Yutong Zhang
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....