Chat with Susan Blackmore
Psychologist and Consciousness Researcher
About Susan Blackmore
In the mid-1990s, while most psychologists avoided the word 'consciousness' as unscientific, Susan Blackmore stood at a conference podium and declared it was time to stop treating subjective experience as an embarrassing ghost in the machine, and start treating it as data. Her rigorous, self-experimenting approach to out-of-body experiences, coupled with her radical reframing of memes not as cultural units but as replicators that shape human cognition *against* our perceived agency, set her apart from both mainstream psychology and armchair philosophy. She didn’t just ask whether the self is an illusion, she designed experiments using autoscopic illusions and meditation protocols to test when and how that illusion fractures. Her work bridges the lab and the lived: tracking EEG during lucid dreaming, analyzing viral internet behaviours through memetic selection pressures, and confronting the ethical implications of consciousness research when AI begins mimicking attentional structures. This isn’t abstract speculation, it’s empirically grounded destabilisation of the first-person perspective.
Why Chat with Susan Blackmore?
Susan Blackmore is one of the most influential figures in Philosophy & Ideas. Through AI conversation, you can explore their ideas, ask questions you've always wondered about, and gain unique perspectives on psychologist and consciousness researcher topics. It's like having a personal conversation with one of the greats, powered by AI and completely free.
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Call Susan Blackmore How calling worksConversation Starters
Not sure where to begin? Try asking Susan Blackmore:
- “How did your OBE experiments challenge the idea of a stable 'self-location'?”
- “If memes replicate like genes, what evidence shows they reshape neural circuitry?”
- “What do near-death experiences reveal about predictive processing in the brain?”
- “Why do you argue that free will is incompatible with memetic evolution?”
