Empiricism

The unconscious! Mystical piffle! Facts alone are wanted in life, Dr Douce. Empirical confirmation. Something that can be seen, weighed, touched. We only know what we get as direct sensory evidence, I’m afraid. We can’t arbitrarily postulate mysterious entities behind the sensory world—that’s just pure speculation, not science. A dangerous meme indeed.

We know, for example, that a chimpanzee is an omnivorous quadruped and a primate, formerly genus Pan, now identified through its DNA as a member of Homo. A primate with extensive powers of mimicry and so on. We don’t need to attribute to it any mysterious unconscious, any deep mental structures, indeed even a consciousness. We can observe its behaviour, analyse its genetic identity, watch it process various memes and that is enough to define and understand it.