Chapter 6: The Empathic Ego
Have you ever watched a child who has just learned to walk run toward a desired object much too quickly and then trip and fall on his face? The child lifts his head, turns, and searches for his mother. He does so with a completely empty facial expression, showing no kind of emotional response. He looks into his mother’s face to find out what has happened. How bad was it, really? Should I cry or should I laugh?
The toddler does not yet know how he should feel; therefore he looks at his mother’s face in order to define the emotional content of his own conscious self-experience. His self-model does not yet have a stable emotional layer to which he could attend and, as it were, register the severity of what just happened. The fascinating point is that here are two biological organisms that just a few months ago, before being physically separated at birth, were one. Their Egos, their phenomenal self- models, are still intimately coupled on the functional level. When the toddler gazes at his mother and starts to smile in relief, there is a sudden transition in his PSM. Suddenly, he discovers that he didn’t hurt himself at all, that the only thing that happened to him was a big surprise. An ambiguity is resolved: Now he knows how he feels.
Neuroscience of empathy
neurons with motor properties in premotor and posterior parietal cortex that fire not only during action execution, but also while observing somebody else performing the same or a similar action.
and
Empathy is implemented by a simulation of the mental states of other people. A large-scale network for empathy is composed of the mirror neuron system, the insula, and the limbic system. Mirror neurons were selected because they provide the adaptive advantage of intersubjectivity.
Back to Metzinger, who goes into details about what the mirror neuron system does:
Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves. For instance, certain regions in the insular cortex are activated when subjects are exposed to a disgusting smell, and the same regions are active when we see an expression of disgust on another person’s face. A common representation of the emotional state of disgust is activated in our brains whether we experience it ourselves or observe it in another individual. Parallel observations in the amygdala have been made for fear.
Particular kinds of empathy can be temporarily switched off:
... certain areas in the ventral striatum of the basal ganglia are necessary in recognizing anger; patients with damage to this area show impairment in identifying aggression signals emit- ted by others. If these areas are blocked pharmacologically (by interfering with dopamine metabolism), subjects can recognize other emotions but can no longer recognize anger. Similar observations have been made for pain. Recent fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiments show that areas in the anterior cingulate cortex and the interior insular cortex are active when we experience pain but also when we observe someone else experiencing pain.
Empathy is made by mirroring high-level perception, rather than low-level sensation. This is confirmed for pain-caused perception and touch-caused perception.
Interestingly, only the emotional part of the pain system is activated; the part associated with the purely sensory aspect of pain is not... Certain higher levels of the somatosensory cortex are activated both when subjects observe others being touched and when they are touched themselves.
Finally, reason-based empathies don't depend on mirror neurons, but rather, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Echopraxia:
The mirror-neuron system may occasionally go awry. Patients suffering from a rare but well-known neurological syndrome called echopraxia are inevitably forced to act out any behavior they observe in other human beings. What likely happens in these patients is that the mirror-neuron system is inadvertently coupled to the motor system because of lack of prefrontal inhibition. Your mirror neurons come online and lose their ordinary status as purely offline simulators. Therefore, you are literally driven by the actions you see other people performing.
It's like sleepwalking. In sleepwalking, the motor neurons inadvertently come online during sleep.
Evolution of an empathetic consciousness
First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact. The next evolutionary step was what Vittorio Gallese... has called embodied simulation. In order to understand the feelings and goals of other human beings, we use our own body-model in the brain to simulate them.
Metzinger thinks however that the step from phenomenal self-model to embodied simulation is an exaptation.
Literally grasping a concept
From a philosophical perspective, the discovery of mirror neurons is exciting because it gave us an idea of how motor primitives could have been used as semantic primitives: that is, how meaning could be communicated between agents. Thanks to our mirror neurons, we can consciously experience another human being’s movements as meaningful.
To be more specific, suppose a child needs to learn the word "to want". They see their father going to grab an apple and say "I want an apple.". The child's mirror neurons internally simulate the action of grabbing, and try to infer what the internal state of the father. In this way, the word "want" is associated with the internal state of wanting.
Depressed people often complain that others can't understand their suffering. On the other side, non-depressed people often complain that depressed people are saying rather meaningless words of pain. Both sides are actually right: it is a grounding problem in action! For example, the words "Nothing really matters." are (usually) grounded in the depressed person's feeling of anhedonia, but when a non-depressed person hears them, the non-depressed person can't even simulate anhedonia in their self-model, and since the words are not grounded, they are meaningless to the non-depressed person.
Perhaps the evolutionary precursor of language was not animal calls but gestural communication. The transmission of meaning may initially have grown out of the unconscious bodily self-model and out of motor agency, based, in our primate ancestors, on elementary gesturing. Sounds may only later have been associated with gestures, perhaps with facial gestures—such as scowling, wincing, or grinning—that already carried meaning. Still today, the silent observation of another human being grasping an object is immediately understood, because, without symbols or thought in between, it evokes the same motor representation in the parieto-frontal mirror system of our own brain.
Still today, we tend to make hand gestures while talking. This is not a coincidence.
there is a representation of the human hand in Broca’s area, a section of the human brain involved in language processing, speech or sign production, and comprehension. A number of studies have shown that hand/arm gestures and movements of the mouth are linked through a common neural substrate. For example, grasping movements influence pronunciation—and not only when they are executed but also when they are observed. It has also been demonstrated that hand gestures and mouth gestures are directly linked in humans, and the oro-laryngeal movement patterns we create in order to produce speech are a part of this link.
I am very surprised by that, and tried looking for references. I think this one fits: Hand actions and speech representation in Broca's area (2006). Maybe this too: Language within our grasp (1998).
Broca’s area is also a marker for the development of language in hu- man evolution, so it is intriguing to see that it also contains a motor representation of hand movements; here may be a part of the bridge that led from the “body semantics” of gestures and the bodily self-model to linguistic semantics, associated with sounds, speech production, and abstract meaning expressed in our cognitive self-model, the thinking self. Broca’s area is present in fossils of Homo habilis, whereas the presumed precursors of these early hominids lacked it. Thus the mirror mechanism is conceivably the basic mechanism from which language evolved. By providing motor copies of observed actions, it allowed us to extract the action goals from the minds of other human beings—and later to send abstract meaning from one Ego Tunnel to the next.
Wait what?? They got Homo habilis's brain?? The brain of Homo habilis: A new level of organization in cerebral evolution (1987).
Conversation with Vittorio Gallese: the Shared Manifold
This conversation is heavily based on The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity (2003):
Starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will propose that our capacity to understand others as intentional agents, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, be deeply grounded in the relational nature of our interactions with the world. According to this hypothesis, an implicit, prereflexive form of understanding of other individuals is based on the strong sense of identity binding us to them. We share with our conspecifics a multiplicity of states that include actions, sensations and emotions. A new conceptual tool able to capture the richness of the experiences we share with others will be introduced: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. I will posit that it is through this shared manifold that it is possible for us to recognize other human beings as similar to us. It is just because of this shared manifold that intersubjective communication and ascription of intentionality become possible. It will be argued that the same neural structures that are involved in processing and controlling executed actions, felt sensations and emotions are also active when the same actions, sensations and emotions are to be detected in others. It therefore appears that a whole range of different ‘mirror matching mechanisms’ may be present in our brain. This matching mechanism, constituted by mirror neurons originally discovered and described in the domain of action, could well be a basic organizational feature of our brain, enabling our rich and diversified intersubjective experiences. This perspective is in a position to offer a global approach to the understanding of the vulnerability to major psychoses such as schizophrenia.
What is the shared manifold? Basically, generalized empathy.
I used this term to characterize what happens when we witness the actions of others, or their overt behavior expressing the sensations and emotions they experience. Basically, it describes our capacity for direct and implicit access to the experiential world of the other. I think the concept of empathy should be extended in order to accommodate and account for all different aspects of expressive behavior enabling us to establish a meaningful link with others. This enlarged notion of empathy is captured by the term “shared manifold.”
The shared manifold can be described at three different levels: a phenomenological level, a functional level, and a subpersonal level.
- phenomenological level: what empathy feels. It feels like we are feeling what others are feeling, but without a sense of ownership.
- functional level: what empathy does. It uses your own self-model to infer what others are feeling, by inputting what they are expressing and what is happening to them into the model, and run simulations.
- subpersonal level: how empathy does things using neural hardware. It uses mirror neurons to represent a space "we-centric space", where there are several person-models active at the same time. In this way, I can intuitively perceive others' feelings. If their person-model in my mind has an anger label, I intuit that they are angry.
The phenomenological level is the one responsible for the sense of similarity—of being part of a larger social community of persons like us—that we experience anytime we encounter others. When confronting the intentional behavior of others, we experience a specific phenomenal state of intentional attunement. This phenomenal state generates the peculiar quality of familiarity with other individuals, produced by the collapse of the others’ intentions into those of the observer. This seems to be one important component of what being empathic is about.
The functional level can be characterized in terms of embodied simulations of the actions we see or of the emotions and sensations whose expression we observe in others.
The subpersonal level is instantiated as the activity of a series of mirroring neural circuits. The activity of these mirror neural circuits is, in turn, tightly coupled with multilevel changes within body-states. We have seen that mirror neurons instantiate a multimodal shared space for actions and intentions. Recent data show that analogous neural networks are at work to generate multimodal emotional and sensitive “we-centric” shared spaces. To put it in simpler words, every time we relate to other people, we automatically inhabit a we-centric space, within which we exploit a series of implicit certainties about the other. This implicit knowledge enables us to understand in a direct way what the other person is doing, why he or she is doing it, and how he or she feels about a specific situation.
If empathy is broken, autism may happen.
Defective intentional attunement, caused by a lack of embodied simulation, might explain some of the social impairments of autistic individuals.
Since empathy and mind-reading are subconscious and instinctive ("prereflexive"), non-autistic people don't need to study psychology to understand each other. They don't even need Folk Psychology. Presumably, Folk Psychology is used to rationalize what happened when things go wrong.
The use of the belief/desire propositional attitudes of folk psychology in social transactions is probably overstated. As emphasized by Jerry [Jerome S.] Bruner, “When things are as they should be, the narratives of Folk Psychology are unnecessary.”
Furthermore, recent evidence shows that fifteen-month-old infants recognize false beliefs. These results suggest that typical aspects of mind-reading, such as the attribution of false beliefs to others, can be explained on the basis of low-level mechanisms that develop well before full-blown linguistic competence.
Chapter 7: Artificial Ego Machines
From this point on, let us call any system capable of generating a conscious self an Ego Machine. An Ego Machine does not have to be a living thing; it can be anything that possesses a conscious self-model.
- a global workspace that is
- generalist: not specialist, can encode distinct modes of information (sight, sound, smell, math...) into the same format
- accessible: not provincial, can input/output to a large number of components in the brain along many pathways
- a minimal phenomenal self in the global workspace
- a spacetime model
- a point in the spacetime model: "here and now"
- a body model around the "here and now" point: "my own body"
- a minimal subject
- the global workspace should have the ability to put different attention on things: enlarge this, minimize that, throw that thing out, put that thing in.
- ability to control attention: some attention-control module is able to predict how attention is distributed within the global workspace.
- a minimal agent
- intermediate steps in the motor process can be sent to the global workspace for further processing. One use for this is that it allows "conscious veto", where the motor process is interrupted before it happens.
The first consists of organizing its internal information flow in a way that generates a psychological moment, an experiential Now. This mechanism will pick out individual events in the continuous flow of the physical world and depict them as contemporaneous (even if they are not), ordered, and flowing in one direction successively, like a mental string of pearls. Some of these pearls must form larger gestalts, which can be portrayed as the experiential content of a single moment, a lived Now.
The second property must ensure that these internal structures cannot be recognized by the artificial conscious system as internally constructed images. They must be transparent. At this stage, a world would appear to the artificial system. The activation of a unified, coherent model of reality within an internally generated window of presence, when neither can be recognized as a model, is the appearance of a world.
In any case, if Metzinger's theory of consciousness is correct, it is entirely within our technical power to create Ego Machines with humanlike self-conscious agents.
The Metzinger test for consciousness: like Turing test for intelligence:
The Metzinger Test for consciousness in nonbiological systems demands that a system not only claim to possess phenomenal experience and a genuine inward perspective but also comprehend and accept the theoretical problem of subjectivity, and that it demonstrate this by participating in a discussion on artificial consciousness. It has to put forward arguments of its own and convincingly defend its own theory of consciousness.
What kind of conscious life is worth living?
- Ego Machines can suffer.
- If we aren't careful, we would make disabled Ego Machines, and we would not know how to give them palliative care.
I was first born in a laboratory, unknowingly falling into a pit of immortality. Life was hell. - We should not create suffering just to know more.
- So don't make Ego Machines until we are very confident that we won't make disabled Ego Machines, or we know how to give palliative care to them.
Here is a thought experiment, aimed not at epistemology but at ethics. Imagine you are a member of an ethics committee considering scientific grant applications. One says: We want to use gene technology to breed mentally retarded human infants. For urgent scientific reasons, we need to generate human babies possessing certain cognitive, emotional, and perceptual deficits. This is an important and innovative research strategy, and it requires the controlled and reproducible investigation of the retarded babies’ psychological development after birth. This is not only important for understanding how our own minds work but also has great potential for healing psychiatric diseases. Therefore, we urgently need comprehensive funding.
No doubt you will decide immediately that this idea is not only absurd and tasteless but also dangerous. One imagines that a proposal of this kind would not pass any ethics committee in the democratic world.
Personally, I find this interesting: it is intuitively bad to make more retards (as proposed in the experiment) and intuitively bad make less retards (by eugenic efforts, offering prenatal testing, and other methods), leading one to conclude that, intuitively, we are living in the best of all possible worlds in terms of the birthrate of retards.
But I digress.
The point of this thought experiment, however, is to make you aware that the unborn artificial Ego Machines of the future would have no champions on today’s ethics committees. The first machines satisfying a minimally sufficient set of conditions for conscious experience and self-hood would find themselves in a situation similar to that of the genetically engineered retarded human infants.
I think the analogy is disingenuous: In effect, Metzinger is saying that, since Ego Machines conscious and have selves, they are like retard human babies. Well, so do most of the animals that humans regularly kill for their meat, for medical experiments, . I guess that means people would consider themselves babyeaters and Dr Mengeles?
It's a perhaps necessary trick, simultaneously allowing readers to continue eating animals, but not human babies or Ego Machines. Personally, I would hope for animal liberation NOW, but that seems as distant as artificial Ego Machines.
Continue.
Albert Camus spoke of the solidarity of all finite beings against death. In the same sense, all sentient beings capable of suffering should constitute a solidarity against suffering. Out of this solidarity, we should refrain from doing anything that could increase the overall amount of suffering and confusion in the universe.
While all sorts of theoretical complications arise, we can agree not to gratuitously increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe—and creating Ego Machines would very likely do this right from the beginning.
Metzinger is not a radical negative utilitarian, though he certainly is very concerned about the amount of pain in the universe, as seen in Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN), and Suffering, the cognitive scotoma.
How would it feel to “come to” as an advanced artificial subject, only to discover that even though you possessed a robust sense of selfhood and experienced yourself as a genuine subject, you were only a commodity?
However, it is not clear whether being considered as a commodity would cause pain to a self-conscious subject, or even a human-like one. Even humans, for them to be "enlightened", must understand that everyone is contingent, nobody is necessary, and nobody is so unique that a loss is irreplaceable. People might claim that someone is "one and only", but the world is big, the space of possible humans is vast, and there are trillions of humans from that space that would be equally nice.
Basically, every human is a commodity, when thinking about it this way. Human culture simply hide this fact and highlight the more or less dispensable uniqueness of everyone. A culturally maintained myth, delusion. Perhaps the solution is to simply expand the culture of delusion, so that when humans interact with them, pretend those artificial Ego Machines are unique.
Well, Metzinger never pretended to be an expert in thinking through ethics about creatures that are radically different from humans. Then he goes antinatalist:
We could create suffering postbiotic Ego Machines before having understood which properties of our biological history, bodies, and brains are the roots of our own suffering. Preventing and minimizing suffering wherever possible also includes the ethics of risk- taking: I believe we should not even risk the realization of artificial phenomenal self-models... If there is such a thing as forbidden fruit in modern consciousness research, it is the careless multiplication of suffering through the creation of artificial Ego Tunnels without a clear grasp of the consequences.
Well, humans have been creating suffering, biotic Ego Machines for millions of years, without any understanding of which properties of our biological history, bodies, and brains are the roots of our own suffering, and with only very limited ability to decrease suffering. This has not prevented the gigantic flood of newborns being excreted like so much watery diarrhea out of wombs.
And try to question the rights of human parents to making new human Ego Machines, and you are labelled a cruel fascist, stupid misanthrope... but question the rights of scientists to make new nonhuman Ego Machines, and it's wise?
If there is such a thing as forbidden fruit in life, it is the careless multiplication of suffering through the creation of Ego Tunnels without a clear grasp of the consequences. Parenthood is the greatest source of sin.
...I really digress.
In any case, Metzinger is sympathetic to pessimism:
Yes, it is true that conscious self-models first brought the experience of pleasure and joy into the physical universe—a universe where no such phenomena existed before. But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running. We can recognize this structure in ourselves, but we will never be able to escape it. We are this structure.
But he stops short of full pessimism, because truth is as valuable as happiness.
Truth may be at least as valuable as happiness. It is easy to imagine someone living a rather miserable life while at the same time making outstanding philosophical or scientific contributions. Such a person may be plagued by aches and pains, by loneliness and self-doubts, but his life certainly has value because of the contribution he makes to the growth of knowledge. If he, too, believes this, he may even find consciously experienced comfort in it. His happiness will thus be very different from the happiness of our artificial Bliss Machines or of the human subjects hooked up to Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Many will agree that this “epistemic” kind of happiness can outweigh a lot of unhappiness of the purely phenomenal type. The same may be said for artistic achievement or moral integrity as sources of happiness. If it makes any sense at all to speak about the value of human existence, we must concede that it depends on more than the conscious experience of happiness.
Note how he made an escape at the last moment: a scientist in pain who has discovered truth must still be happy, because naked truth, by itself, is too bitter to swallow. Metzinger is not ready to embrace stark depressive truth-seeking, a planet of scientists consumed by painful research into the deepest folds of reality.
Fortunately, our universe is not as bad as H. P. Lovecraft imagined. Drilling into the depths of truth will not drive one mad. In place of terrifying monsters, there is only the eternal silence of space. How lucky it is for Metzinger, to not live in a cosmic horror story!
Indeed, he is optimistic that better-than-human Ego Machines will be constructed, and imagines a future Ego Machine done right speaking about itself:
Postbiotic subjectivity is much better than biological subjectivity. It avoids all the horrific consequences of the biological sense of selfhood, because it can overcome the transparency of the self-model. Postbiotic subjectivity is better than biological subjectivity because it achieves adaptivity and self-optimization in a much purer form than does the process you call “life.” By developing ever more complex mental images, which the system can recognize as its own images, it can expand mentally represented knowledge without naive realism. Therefore, my form of postbiotic subjectivity minimizes the overall amount of suffering in the universe instead of increasing it, as the process of biological evolution on this planet did.
Metzinger's attitude is clear, though: don't create any Ego Machines we don't understand, except humans, because we are good at allowing humans live a good life.
Or maybe it's a practical issue: it's just too hard to ban human-creation compared to banning nonhuman-Ego-Machine-creation.
Or it's a lesser-of-two-evils issue: it's bad to create Ego Machines carelessly, but it's even worse to stop existence completely.
I guess Metzinger cannot overcome the biological urge to breed.
As long as such questions remain unanswered, we should refrain from trying to create artificial Ego Machines, and not only for ethical reasons. We cannot overlook the irreversibility of certain developments. Any postbiotic system that comes even close to attaining the properties of phenomenal selfhood—any system developing a reasonably robust first-person perspective—will be an autonomous agent. At a certain level of autonomy, we will have to accept these systems as persons in their own right and enter into a dialogue with them. Our criteria for what is an object of moral concern and what should be treated as a person will make it impossible for us simply to turn them off.
As I deal with realities, not moralities, this argument is uninteresting to me. I don't care whether it should be done, but rather whether it would be done. Would it be done? Based on the bloody history of life on earth, I say, absolutely.
Also, note that it is an explicit argument for antinatalism: if we can't make an Ego Machine the right way, don't make it at all. It doesn't matter if our creation might refuse suicide and consider their lives better than nothing: we can still do it wrong. Indeed, why are we not allowed to create artificial retards, if not because of an antinatalism? Last time I checked, most retards would rather stay alive than suicide.
Chapter 8: Consciousness technologies and the image of humankind
We are Ego Machines, but we do not have selves. We cannot leave the Ego Tunnel, because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego and its Tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world, and the Ego is merely a complex physical event—an activation pattern in your central nervous system.
It is hard to believe this. You cannot believe it. This may also be the core of the puzzle of consciousness: We sense that its solution is radically counterintuitive. The bigger picture cannot be properly reflected in the Ego Tunnel—it would dissolve the tunnel itself. Put differently, if we wanted to experience this theory as true, we could do so only by radically transforming our state of consciousness.
The idea of "too much knowledge can hurt you" is not limited to self-knowledge about consciousness. It also applies to morality.
Humans punish cheaters. Why? Because of righteous anger. Why do humans feel righteous anger? Because humans evolved in an environment that shaped them to be very social. Why do we kill human psychopaths, protect lions, and pet cats? We are programmed to be social as much as they are programmed to be asocial. But this realization, if taken too much to heart, would harm our morality modules. The morality modules did not evolve to handle too much insight from the analysis module, and this much crosstalk can lead to deadly paralysis.
Knowledge breaches can dissolve minds, as much as containment breaches can melt a chemical plant.
The first phase of the Consciousness Revolution is about understanding conscious experience as such, about what I have been calling the Tunnel. It is well under way and yielding results. The second phase will go to the core of the problem by unraveling the mysteries of the first-person perspective and of what I have been calling the Ego. This phase has begun, as exemplified by the recent flurry of scientific papers and books on agency, free will, emotions, mind-reading, and self-consciousness in general.
The third phase will inevitably lead us back to the normative dimension of this historical transition—into anthropology, ethics, and political philosophy. It will confront us with a host of new questions about what we want to do with all this new knowledge about ourselves, and about how to deal with the new possibilities resulting from it. How are we to live with this brain? Which states of consciousness are beneficial, and which are harmful to us? How will we integrate this new awareness into our culture and our society? What are the likely consequences of a clash of anthropologies—of the increasing competition between the old and the new images of humanity?
The emerging image of Homo sapiens is of a species whose members once longed to have immortal souls but are slowly recognizing they are self-less Ego Machines. The biological imperative to live—indeed, live forever—was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model, over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile. Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model.
Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive metacontext... On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered. Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious fundamentalism, even in secular societies.
Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation.
Metzinger thought that neuroscience would dissolve the belief in immortal souls and that would lead to a crisis of ethics, and that is why conscious researchers should consider their research dangerous like nuclear engineering and biotech, and must consider the ethics. They must not release their research if they think it would lead to social instability, and should think up (or ask from ethics philosophers for) new ethics to be consumed with their research.
I think that's wrong on two accounts:
- Evolution and the success of materialistic physics should already have dissolved it. It hasn't. The capacity that humans have for rationalization is amazing.
- Chinese ethics does not depend on immortal souls, but rather social and familial obligations. The moral rules are real and immortal, even if people aren't.
- Even Western people don't take immortal souls that seriously.
Who really believes in afterlives that seriously, except to plaster over the festering wound of reality called "DEATH"? If people really took a happy afterlife seriously, they should be overjoyed by terrorist attacks. They should also stop all the stupidly aggressive treatments for diseases. After all, afterlife awaits those who did not die by suicide!
There is a funny saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes." Why is that? Because people pray to God to let them live. But why not pray to God to let them die? Dying of an innocent accident is a sure way to go to paradise, according to Christianity. Why would one want to be a Christian in a foxhole, anyway? Do they really like the odds of 50% paradise (if they are on the good side), 50% hell (if they are on the evil side)? Much better is 100% nothingness.
But I'm joking, of course. People pray to God to live and procrastinate on going to paradise. Paradise is a last-resort when death absolutely can't be avoided.
Metzinger then comes to "phenotechnology".
There is a second positive aspect of the new image of human beings that will allow us to see ourselves in a different light. It is the unfathomable depth of our phenomenal-state space. The mathematical theory of neural networks has revealed the enormous number of possible neuronal configurations in our brains and the vastness of different types of subjective experience. Most of us are completely unaware of the potential and depth of our experiential space. The amount of possible neurophenomenological configurations of an individual human brain, the variety of possible tunnels, is so large that you can explore only a tiny fraction of them in your lifetime. Nevertheless, your individuality, the uniqueness of your mental life, has much to do with which trajectory through phenomenal-state space you choose. Nobody will ever live this conscious life again. Your Ego Tunnel is a unicum, one of a kind. In particular, a naturalistic, neuroscientific image of humanity suddenly makes it obvious not only that we have a huge number of phenomenal states at our disposal but also that explicit awareness of this fact and the ability to make use of it systematically could now become common to all human beings.
Being an autonomous agent and being able to take responsibility for your own life will take on a completely new meaning once neurotechnology starts to unfold into neurophenomenological technology, or what might be called phenotechnology.
We can definitely increase our autonomy by taking control of the conscious mind-brain, exploring it in some of its deeper dimensions. This particular aspect of the new image of humankind is good news. But it is also dangerous news. Either we find a way to deal with these new neurotechnological possibilities in an intelligent and responsible manner, or we will face a series of historically unprecedented risks. That is why we need a new branch of applied ethics—consciousness ethics.
Chapter 9: A new kind of ethics
- mood modification (prozac, etc)
- cognitive enhancement (Modafinil, etc)
- religious and mystical experiences and ecstasies (Marsh Chapel Experiment, etc)
- happiness, party, pure hedonism (MDMA, marijuana, etc)
- mind-reading technology (by reading out the neural correlates of consciousness)
Every child has a right to be provided with a “neurophenomenological toolbox” in school; at minimum this should include two meditation techniques, one silent and one in motion; two standard techniques for deep relaxation, such as autogenic training and progressive muscle relaxation; two techniques for improving dream re- call and inducing lucidity; and perhaps a course in what one might call “media hygiene.” If new possibilities for manipulation threaten our children’s mental health, we must equip them with efficient instruments to defend themselves against new dangers, increasing their autonomy.
Some final public-relationship bullshit...
Developing a consciousness culture has nothing to do with establishing a religion or a particular political agenda. On the contrary, a true consciousness culture will always be subversive, by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives.
Metzinger has never heard of irreligious anarchism, apparently. Can't subvert the state or the religion when there is no state or religion to subvert!
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