Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 4)

 Chapter 6: The Empathic Ego

This chapter adds more complexity to the ego model. In previous chapters, Metzinger assembled up from minimal phenomenal self, to minimal subject, to minimal agent, and now he would describe human egos as agents with extra modules for living in a human society.

Metzinger gives a shocking observation that suggests even emotional self-consciousness is learned, rather than innate:

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

What are mirror neurons? According to Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons (2009):

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.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 3)

Chapter 4: From Ownership to Agency to Free Will

Review

In chapter 3, Metzinger used OBE and other disruptions to self-consciousness to sketch out a 3-part model of consciousness:

• Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
• Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
• Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward. 
  It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint. 
  It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
  Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.

Metzinger further contends that to create a thing that feels, it is necessary and sufficient to make a "minimal phenomenal selfhood". A minimal phenomenal selfhood is made of these parts:

• A model of spacetime.
• A point in the spacetime model, indicating "here I am".
• A model of the body (usually humanoid) centered around the viewpoint.
• A global workspace, that is, a buffer memory unit like the RAM. 

And to augment a minimal phenomenal selfhood into a minimal subject, it is necessary and sufficient to add:

• A self-attention control module. The three components of the minimal phenomenal selfhood should appear in the global workspace, and the self-attention control module's function is to emphasize/deemphasize parts of the self-body-model into focus in the global workspace.

This whole system for making a minimal subject is called a phenomenal self-model. It is reasonably easy to construct even with today's technology. It is probable that the self-driving cars in 5 years will have phenomenal self-models.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 2)

Chapter 3: Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self

This Chapter is fairly easy. It studies some disruptions of human self-consciousness and explain their meaning. The disruptions include OBE (Out-of-Body Experiences), autoscopy, heautoscopy, rubber-hand illusion, full-body rubber-hand illusion, phantom limbs.

Let's get the conclusion first:

You are never in direct contact with your own body. What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion, what AZ feels, or what Philip feels when his left arm is “plugged in” is exactly the same as what you feel when you attend to the sensation of your hands holding this book right now or to the feeling of pressure and resistance when you lean back in your chair. What you experience is not reality but virtual reality, a possibility. Strictly speaking, and on the level of conscious experience alone, you live your life in a virtual body and not in a real one.

Yes, everything we experience is virtual. We never experience reality directly, but only the brain simulation.

So what is the self in this simulation? The self is a complex construction of several parts, all of which usually stays together, but might come apart. The components are:

• Model of the physical body: the arms, the legs, the joint-angles, the head...
• Model of the inside of the physical body (interoceptive self): temperature, fullness, heartrate...
• Model of the viewpoint: a "camera" in the model of the world. It is usually sitting between the eyes of the physical body model, but it can move around.
• Others.

Metzinger wants to get to the bottom of things: find the "minimal phenomenal selfhood", the bare essentials for making a self.

We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary. You can shut the windows in front of the little man behind your eyes by closing your eyelids. The seeing self disappears; the Ego remains. You can be a robust, conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought. Emotions, will, and thoughts are not necessary to the fundamental sense of selfhood. Every meditator (remember chapter 1) can confirm that you may settle into a calm, emotionally neutral state, deeply relaxed and widely alert, a state of pure observation, without any thought, while a certain elementary form of bodily self-consciousness remains. Let us call this “selfhood-as-embodiment.”

Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible.

Examples of self-doubling illusions like autoscopy, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences (OBE)

Three kinds of self-models

Keep these three kinds of self-models in mind as you study the odd states of self-consciousness.

• Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
• Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
• Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward. 
  It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint. 
  It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
  Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.

These three self-models are meant to synthesize different kinds of sensory data. Here, I am speculating since I can't find papers about this.

• Physical body model synthesizes sensory input on the body: location of localized pain, heat, coldness, touch, pressure.
• Astral body model synthesizes proprioceptive input, vestibular input, and active motor output. 
• Viewpoint model synthesizes location of visual and auditory sources. Basically, if you hear something from the left, and sees something 
  Your viewpoint model is updated continuously by sensory input. There is a constant inference loop between your viewpoint model and the visual sources and audio sources in the world model, as your brain tries to integrate all visual, auditory, vestibular, and other senses into one consistent model of the world with a viewpoint.
• If the ear senses an acceleration upwards, that would tend to move your viewpoint model up. 
• If the eye sees most of the scenery moving to the right, that would tend to move your viewpoint model to the left, or turn it to the left. 
• If the eye sees most of the scenery staying still, but a small blob moving to the right, you would keep your viewpoint model stable, but move the model of the blob.
  

The art of ventriloquism is all about confusing the viewpoint model, so that the sound source is incorrectly modelled.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 1)

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Metzinger, 2009)

Start with six questions.

1. One-World Problem, or the unity of consciousness; 
2. Now Problem, or the appearance of a lived moment; 
3. Reality Problem, or why you were born as a naive realist; 
4. Ineffability Problem, or what we will never be able to talk about; 
5. Evolution Problem, or the question of what consciousness was good for; 
6. Who Problem, or the issue of what is the entity that has conscious experience. 

One-World Problem

Metzinger is a philosopher that can really read, and he once set out to 

photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references. I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennial endeavor to understand the conscious mind. To my surprise, I found two such essential insights.

The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thoughts and other mental states... in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.

This, Metzinger skips over.

The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous whole. If we have this whole, then a world appears to us. If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come apart, you lose consciousness.

Why do we see one world only? Why can't we consciously multitask? Why can't we consciously multi-see, multi-feel, multi-think? (Certainly, we can multitask unconsciously, as in, talking while bicycling while balancing the groceries in one hand, but only one task might occupy the consciousness at one time.)

Susan Blackmore's Theory of the Self

Susan Blackmore is a scientist who is most famous for studying memes, with the book The Meme Machine (2000). It's a bit outdated at this point though. She's also a skeptic in debunking some pseudoscience.

I'll start with two videos:

Memes and Tremes

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

Living Without Free Will

When I say that consciousness is an illusion, I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.