Who is Thomas Metzinger?
Thomas Metzinger (born 12 March 1958) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy... active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness studies as an academic endeavour...
- Analytical philosophy of mind
- Philosophy of cognitive science
- Philosophical problems of neuroscience
- Applied ethics (especially for neurotechnology, AI, and virtual reality; plus conceptual connections between ethics, anthropology, and philosophy of mind)
- Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2004). The definitive book on his theory of consciousness.
- The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009). The popularized version of that book.
Some lectures
Ray and Thomas will be talking about how cognitive neuroscience is unlocking the physical basis of personal experience.
We find Ray Brassier to be an extremely persuasive thinker. He’s the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, from which please here find one of the most popular quotes, by way of:
Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.
The author of Being No-One, Thomas Metzinger is one of the leading philosophers of the mind and consciousness. He was a co-founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and has been the president of the German Cognitive Science Society.
What if what we consider as our self is just a process: an evolutionarily solution whose efficiency causes us to think we experience reality, naively mistaking experiences as ours? What if where we think there’s a ‘self’, really there is no one? Could this ‘no one’ could be constructed elsewhere, or manipulated? Can we trust what we feel, or what we think?
Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by German philosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves.
Some interviews
There is no thing in the brain or outside in the world, which is us. We are processes... The best way to describe self consciousness is as a representational process: an image that is sometimes generated in the brain. Sometimes it’s not generated, for example in dreamless, deep sleep. It’s a very fragile and vulnerable, intermittent phenomenon, but there is no metaphysical entity such as the self which could exist independently of the brain.
I would guess that most cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and almost all philosophers today would subscribe to the idea that is there no thing or substance like the self that can exist independently of the brain. In science and philosophy, the a concept of such a metaphysical self is long gone.
But somehow for our life in the world, the feeling of being a self is very important. One important function is mortality denial, I guess. We like to believe in an innermost essence or core, because it allows us to deny our finitude, or at least leave an open door of hope for life after death. And that’s also why it’s not going to go away. I think the notion of self is going to stay in our everyday life and in our culture.
The body and the mind are constantly changing. Nothing in us is ever really the same from one moment to the next. Yet the self represents a very strong phenomenal experience of sameness, and it’s clear this would be adaptive or helpful for a biological organism that needs to plan for the future...
... you could have a rope—a long rope made of very different strings of different color. And no string, neither the red string nor the blue nor the green one, would go through the whole length of the rope. Yet the rope could be very robust, strong, and stable, even though there is not one thread that goes through it from beginning to end. I think that’s a good image for how we are on the bodily level, as well as on a psychological level.
Despite this, we have robust experiences of autonomy and self- determination. We have the experience of controlling our behavior, and we also have an experience of mental self- determination, controlling our attention, our mental state and all of these things. As modern science shows, these experiences may not be fully veridical, but just adaptive. It may be functional to have the robust experience that you are in control, but from an from the third person perspective of science, it seems that such experiences may not reflect the truth of our nature. The self is not a thing, but a process.
Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality? (2018)
What explains the evolution of a self?
I think even simple animals that can’t have beliefs or higher cognitive states about themselves have a robust sense of selfhood. There’s a long history of conscious self-models on this planet. They have been here long before human beings have arrived on the scene; they are a product of evolution with many biological functions.
One, for instance, is to control the body—to match sensory perceptions onto motor behavior in a meaningful way. Another much deeper one is the unconscious forms of self-representation; for instance, the immune system that biological organisms have evolved. A million times every day our immune systems says, “this is me” or “this is not me,” “kill or don’t kill,” “cancer cell” or “good tissue.” If it would make a mistake in one of these selections, you would already have one malignant tumor cell every day. So we are grounded in very efficient mechanisms of defending the integrity of the organism, the life-process itself.
Some papers
Dreams are conscious, but we usually don't have "mental autonomy" in dreams. This paper claims that 2/3 of our conscious lifetime is not personal, because we don't have "mental autonomy" during those times. They are like waking dreams.
This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind.
What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about 2/3 of our conscious lifetime, because while conscious cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. The instantiation of a stable first-person perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of human beings. I argue that individual representational events only become part of a personal-level process by being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent conscious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’ (EAM). The EAM may be the true origin of our consciously experienced firstperson perspective.
- subpersonal process: things that parts of the brain does that you don't notice, you don't claim to have done. Things your brain do that are impersonal. For example, recognizing a blob of light as "the moon" is a subpersonal process in the V1 visual cortex. You cannot do it consciously, and you don't claim to have done it yourself. You probably don't even know that it is done, and think that you "directly perceive the moon" without any visual cortex doing any work.
- (conscious) mental action: like physical actions, but mental. For example, deliberately focusing one’s attention on a perceptual object or consciously drawing a logical conclusion are examples of mental actions. An "action" must be consciously perceived, and felt as consciously owned (there is the feeling of "I intended to do it" rather than "some alien beam is controlling my body/thoughts").
- agentive: being an agent, intending what to do, what to imagine, what to believe, what goal to reach. As with mental actions, being an agent does not mean that you "really" decided to do those things (free will might very well be illusionary). It simply means that you intend to do, imagine, believe, set goals, and intention does not need to be free.
- epistemic agency: intending what to believe. "I decide to not believe I will die." is an instance of epistemic agency.
- stable first-person perspective: when you first wake up, you do not exist. It takes time for you to become a person with a perspective. There are also times when the first-person perspective goes away, as in deep meditation, fully focused work-trance (as when I do math), and after taking psychedelics like LSD (called "ego death").
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- necessary conditions of personhood: a waking human brain does not always have a person inside. When it becomes unconscious, for example in a seizure, there is clearly no person inside. However, there can be other cases where the brain is conscious, but still does not have a person inside. "Having a person inside" is a property of the brain that can be true or false, in the same way that "is running an Operating System" can be true or false for a computer. Metzinger claims that, often, a human brain is conscious but not having a person inside.
- agent model/self model: what the brain imagines the body is like: where the hands are, the feet are, what the blood pressure is, etc. The brain continuously updates its body-model, by electric messages sent through nerves. As an analogy, in the Department of Economy, there is a model of the country's economy, which is continuously updated by news from all the provinces.
The following video by Hod Lipson shows a robot with a simple self-model. Of course, all centrally-controlled robots have some kind of self-model in their central controller, but most such self-models are hard to visualize. This little spider's self-model is very easy to visualize, which makes it a striking example.
Striking example of self-model errors include the phantom limb syndrome, somatoparaphrenia, and maybe alien hand syndrome. - phenomenal self-model: A brain can run many self-models. There can be one model for the skeletal muscles, another for the hormonal levels, another for social relations, etc. Self-models can be entirely unconscious. A phenomenal self-model is a conscious self-model. It's unclear what makes a self-model conscious. Metzinger proposed 10 necessary conditions for a self-model to be conscious.
- epistemic agent model: a self-model about knowledge. Think about "known knowns", "known unknowns", "unknown knowns" and "unknown unknowns". The "known knowns" and "known unknowns" are in the epistemic agent model. The "unknown unknowns" and "unknown knowns" are not.
Yes, "unknown knowns" exist! For example, blindsight.
Mental autonomy includes the capacity to impose rules on one’s own mental behaviour, to explicitly select goals for mental action, the ability for rational guidance and, most importantly, for the intentional inhibition, suspension, or termination of an ongoing mental process.
Daydreaming:
‘Mind-wandering’, or spontaneous, task-unrelated thought, is a paradigm example of unintentional mental behaviour. It may often be purposeful, but exhibits no conscious goal-representation, no overt behavioural correlates, it is characterized by an unnoticed loss of mental self-control and high degrees of automaticity, plus a lack of sensitivity to the situational context, while the phenomenological profile is characterized by ownership without agency, variable or absent introspective availability of goaldirectedness, and frequently by a complete lack of meta-awareness (Schooler et al., 2011). Empirically, it is plausible to assume that unconscious mind-wandering, instantiating no phenomenal properties whatsoever, exists as well.
Unintentional mental behavior (as opposed to intentional mental actions):
Some mental activities are not autonomously controllable, because one centrally important defining characteristic does not hold: they cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. Let us call these activities ‘unintentional mental behaviours’
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