The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

by Thomas Metzinger

We’re used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain—an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is “a virtual self in a virtual reality.”

But if the self is not “real,” why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Neuroscience, Spirituality, Brain

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2009

About the author

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. He currently holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

He has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness studies as an academic endeavor.

In 2003 he published the monograph Being No One. In this book he argues that no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. He argues that the phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model."

Metzinger is praised for his grasp of the fundamental issues of neurobiology, consciousness and the relationship of mind and body. However, his views about the self are the subject of considerable controversy and ongoing debates.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never mind that Buddhist philosophers have pointed out the (ultimate) nonexistence of the self for about twenty-five centuries, with hundreds of great minds in major world cultures that created vast literatures containing detailed arguments, treatises, and textual commentaries all based in a highly-refined phenomenological methodology called meditation combined with reason, logic, and argument among numerous competing schools of refined thought in India, China, Tibet, Japan, Korea, and SE Asian countries.

No, Metzinger, in his Western intellectual ethnocentrism, has to make this HIS theory, and make only passing mention of Buddhist views of the doctrine of no-self. Hey, I love Western thought as much as anyone else but who in today's globalized world can continue to ignore the philosophical traditions and positions of other major world cultures? It's time Westerners wake up out of our continuing colonialist mindset and get beyond the fear- and ignorance-based dismissals of Asian thought as "merely religion" and take seriously their richly detailed and argued responses to the human condition. Rational-literary philosophy did not begin with the Greeks but rather with the Greeks, Indians, and the Chinese, propagating out from there into neighboring cultures who then further developed them. The philosophy of Tibet alone rivals all of the Greek tradition.

Let's grant Metzinger some slack in that a theory of no-self in the context of modern cognitive science is valuable and he's brave enough to go down that road. However, it will most likely be through the embodied mind and complex systems approach that such a marriage will be realized, not in the old-fashioned, brain-bound, internalist view that Metzinger espouses. And any such marriage of cognitive science and the theory of selflessness will have to come from someone who's conversant in both embodied mind cognitive science AND Buddhist philosophy. A good place to start for an approach to this convergence is Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience or the in current works of Evan Thompson such as his books Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind and Waking, Dreaming, Being - Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy.

Good introductions to the central philosophy of Buddhism and the doctrine of anatman/anatta (no-self) are:
1) Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction by Jan Westerhoff,
2) C. W. Huntington's Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Mādhyamika, and
3) Jay L. Garfield's Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy.

Another important volume on this topic is M. Siderits, E. Thompson, D. Zahavi's Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions. And for a historical look at the development of Western intellectual ethnocentrism, see Robert Solomon's Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense, 1750-1850.

The increasing number of volumes on Buddhist and other Asian philosophies make scholars who ignore them or are unaware of them look ridiculously provincial and out of touch with the global pulse. What self-respecting philosopher today can ignore the philosophical traditions of other great world cultures? Wake up people: Western philosophy and thought make up no more than one third of the world philosophical pie. Fortunately there are dozens of scholars who have now been trained in both Asian and Western systems and are doing outstanding cross-cultural scholarship which is bringing great insights to Western philosophical and scientific issues.

And for those of you who do know Buddhist philosophy, you know that Mahayana Buddhist philosophy not only asserts the ultimate non-existence of the self (from original Buddhism) but also the ultimate non-existence of all phenomena, otherwise known as shunyata/emptiness. Knowledge of this much broader philosophical critique makes Metzinger's focus on the no-self seem even more out of touch and lacking in a thorough understanding of what he's attempting to show.

Updated Jan 20, 2014
Updated Sept 4, 2017
Updated Oct 7, 2020

Note: This is a review of a book, not Metzinger's life, lectures, presentations, etc. I'm aware that he's more familiar with Buddhist theory and practices and refers to some of this in his various talks.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite simply one of the best books on consciousness I've ever read. I really want to do this book justice with a fantastic review, and I don't know if that's possible. But I'm going to do my best.

Consciousness is really the last frontier of neuroscience and philosophy...holy grail might be a more apt terminology. Sure, there are lots of other unanswered questions in the sciences, but besides maybe some questions about the fundamental makeup of our universe, we at least know HOW to go about answering these questions. A comprehensive theory of consciousness has eluded us precisely because even trying to frame the question properly has proven difficult. What exactly is consciousness? Is it wakefulness? Is it awareness? Intentionality? Representation? Subjective experience?

Neuroscience has been slowly chipping away at the problem. And one thing you will often hear from neuroscientists and even some philosophers has to do with finding the neural correlates of consciousness. It's been neuroscientific dogma for some time now that neuronal firing is what leads to and causes conscious experience. This is not an easy statement to disagree with. It seems obvious. Patterns of neuronal firing represent our sensory information, our memories, our emotions. Block neuronal firing in some areas of the brain and your conscious experience is changed. Mental states = brain states, and brain states = neuronal firing. And yet there is something that is being ignored here. Namely, there is nothing inherent in the description of neuronal firing, let alone any physical processes, to explain HOW and WHY neuronal firing causes subjective phenomenal experience. This is what is called the explanatory gap in philosophy. We can all imagine an organism, or even a robot, with the same functional equivalence of systems and processes without the subjective experience that goes along with it. A very complicated computer. There is nothing in the laws of physics or chemistry or biology that lead to the prediction that collections of certain types of matter will experience consciousness, no matter how complex they are. Why do I experience anything? Why is there even a me?

And here is where an important point comes in. Neuroscience has also chipped away at many classical ideas of what a self is. I've always had the sneaking suspicion that the hard problems of consciousness were in some way inextricably tied to the concept of a self. Without stating this explicitly, this is exactly where Metzinger's starting point is. The Ego Tunnel is Metzinger's attempt at explaining both consciousness and the self. Why is consciousness subjective? What is the self? What exactly is it that is reading this book review right now? Metzinger doesn't beat around the bush, and straight off states that there are no such things as, and never have been, any "selves" in the world. And the metaphor Metzinger uses to explain how this is the Ego Tunnel.

What is the Ego Tunnel? No one can be told what the Ego Tunnel is, you have to experience it for yourself. Just kidding...

The ego tunnel is a selective way of representing information. What we see and hear and feel and smell and taste is only a small fraction of what exists "out there" in the world. Our conscious model of reality (if you don't understand that all we experience is a model of reality, this book may not be the best starting point) is a low dimensional projection of an inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding us. Our sensory organs are limited, they evolved for survival, not for depicting objective reality. And so the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an "image of reality" as a "tunnel through it". Whenever our brains succeed in creating this unified and dynamic portrait of reality, we become conscious. And when the organism can generate an inner image of itself as a whole, including the body, psychological states, relationships to the past and future, this internal image is what Metzinger calls the phenomenal ego. An I. A self. A Phenomenal Self Model. By placing this self model within the world, a center is created, which is experienced as a self, as a me, and is what Metzinger calls the Ego Tunnel

There are six problems the Metzinger sees in developing a comprehensive theory of consciousness:

1) The one world problem (or the unity of conscious experience)

This has also been called the binding problem. But it is basically the problem of how so many disparate processes in the brain combine to create the unity of one world. There is no one place in the brain where all the different parts of the visual signal combine and form into a picture, there is no one place in the brain where sight and sound and smell and taste all combine to create a unified sensory experience, there is no one place where these senses combine with memory and emotion and cognition to create the unified experience of consciousness. Yet it happens.

Francis Crick and Christof Koch suggested that this binding happens through the oscillation of the relevant neurons at something like 40-70hz. Metzinger runs with this theory, talking about a "cloud" of neuronal firing. Whatever is in the cloud is conscious information. And whatever isn't, isn't. This binding of various processes allows the world to appear to us.

2) The now problem (the appearance of a lived moment)

An image of a world alone is not enough, we also experience the world consciously through time. In fact, without a sense of time, there would be no consciousness. But ironically, a complete scientific description of the physical universe would not contain the information as to "what time is now". So how does this happen?

Metzinger basically stresses the importance of being able to flag the "now" as real. Being able to differentiate between memories and fantasies and "the real world" is a huge survival advantage. Having a concept of "now" also allowed us to plan future actions, and to compare internal dry runs with given features of the world. Again though, he stresses that this experienced "now" is not real in the sense that we normally think it is. It is itself a representation. Just think about the fact that due to the unavoidable time taken in signal processing and neuronal firing, that what you experience as "now" actually occurred some time in the past...


3) The reality problem (why you were born as a naïve realist)

If you solve the one world problem and the now problem, all you have is a unified picture of the world and a model of the present moment in time in the brain. But consciousness is something more. You are not aware of these representations, or even that they ARE representations, you EXPERIENCE these representations as reality. Here is where Metzinger's concept of transparency becomes vital. For any second order process that occurs at a slower rate than a first order process, that first order process will be necessarily transparent to the second order process. You watch a film and you see fluid motion in front of you. But if the film reel is moving too slowly, you become aware of the individual frames and of the illusion of motion that you have been under falls apart. Because the processes that creates the contents of your conscious experience are transparent, you are constitutionally unable to know they are representations. They appear to you as REAL as opposed to what they are, just the internal contents of brain function.

4) The ineffability problem (what we will never be able to talk about)

Present a person with two very similar shades of green and they will be able to discern a difference between the two colors. But show them one of those shades of green again, and they will be unable to tell you which one it is. We can consciously represent the the difference between colors, but are unable to consciously represent the sameness of an individual color. Even the subjective experience of certainty, is itself only an appearance, just an experience, and not objective fact, because it doesn't exist neuronally. This threatens any comprehensive theory of consciousness, because if there are no concepts for certain objects in one theory, they cannot be reduced to concepts in another one, and I don't think Metzinger really answers this issue as much as talks about it for a while, unless I missed something.

5) The evolution problem (what was consciousness good for)

Consciousness is not cheap from a biological perspective. And here Metzinger evokes the global workspace theory (by some psychologist who's name evades me at the moment). Dan Dennett talks about this in terms of the orienting response, or the all hands on deck theory. What these ideas all in essence say, is that there needs to a process that makes global information available to an organism to further plan motor behavior. Whatever might be relevant to a situation needs to be available for processing. When you don't know what's going to happen next, you need as much relevant information as possible to plan your next move. But what WASN'T evolutionarily beneficial or efficient would be to create another level of complexity and represent the meta nature of the information. It would be way too costly to create a system that informed an organism that a "bear representation" was present in the brain, when all that is needed is to know "there is a bear in front of me".

6) The who problem (what is the entity that has conscious experience)

In the end, Metzinger tells us that what we are is in essence a simulation that the organism runs. This simulation binds disparate information together and creates a world model, flags the now to develop an ongoing experience of now in time, is unable to understand the representational nature of the world due to the transparency of the information, and has the experience of attending to whatever information is currently in the global workspace. Our conscious experience IS the content of the simulation. Nothing more nothing less. We are not our bodies, we are not our brains, we are not the contents of our wallet...we are a simulation that the brain runs to facilitate survival in the world, but due to it's nature we are constitutionally unable to know we are simulation.

This is all in the first third of the book (a pretty short book mind you). Metzinger goes on to talk about lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, hallucinogenic drugs, and more. This area of the book gets more into the territory you might be familiar with if you read V.S. Ramachandran or Oliver Sacks. But while he seems to wander at times, Metzinger always ties these conversations back into his main theory of the Phenomenal Self Model. Towards the end he gets into some pretty interesting stuff about ethics and morality, as what is ethics but prescriptions about different states of consciousness?

I can't recommend this book enough. I have only two caveats worth mentioning:

1) This is maybe not the best intro book to consciousness studies. It helps to have some background and understanding of neuroscience or psychology or philosophy to really understand the significant nature of the problems Metzinger addresses. I think you can probably read the book and enjoy it without this knowledge, but knowing how and why these problems are so difficult gives you a finer appreciation for the task Metzinger has set for himself.

2) He still hasn't REALLY explained subjective experience in my mind. But I'm too tired to explain why right now. Sufficed to say he does the best job out of anyone I've ever read. And he DOES manage to explain the self. Right or wrong he certainly doesn't sidestep the issue.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a psychology background, so I am deeply interested in neuroscience and AI research. I've even read Metzinger several times in the past, ranking him up there with Dennet and also a number of bleeding edge modern philosophers. :)

So I had to read this DESPITE that HORRIBLE TITLE. Ego Tunnel? Seriously? I mean, sure, he explains it as the outward connection after we've formulated our internal modality of consciousness, but STILL... EGO TUNNEL?

Enough bitching. And no crude jokes, please. This book is actually some pretty awesome philosophy, metaphysics, and neuroscience. He asks the big questions.

Such as, what is consciousness when it's being ignored by neuroscience or being butchered by quacks?

No laughter. He takes it seriously and it's well worth the effort to ask. We've all been asking it on one level or another, but everyone agrees: consciousness cannot and will not be reducible. No simple explanation will take away the quantity or the quality of anyone's experience. We all recognize our being conscious as highly subjective and reproducible. That's not an issue.

But what is an issue is HOW consciousness is formed. This is important for not only AI research or our damaged selves or any number of psychological needs-based therapy... but because of the fact of knowing causes a qualitative and quantifiable dimension to the nature of what we are. And from there, we have a lot more tools in our toolbox.

The book is a lot denser than I can give good treatment for a review, but let me explain some of my most exciting discoveries.

We are what we say we are. And by "say" I mean unconscious and conscious self-references. If we lose a leg, we might have a phantom limb, but we work around it because we have included our "body" in our reference frame. When we drive and get good at it, we often just "feel" if we'll make a tight parking space because we've included the car in our reference frame. It is our new "body". Pick up a baseball bat or a sword and make it an extension of you. Video games. You become your avatars if you're doing it right.

It is a meta-understanding of your surroundings that is infinitely adjustable. Reality itself is just a shadow, of course, in both physics and in the Platonic ideal, but our conscious and unconscious restructuring of our "body" field gives us better and better understanding of our surroundings. Connecting with other people with meta-narratives, models, modes, is an effort in sidestepping "reality" in order to fit the two models and narratives together. Hence... the tunnel. :)

Cool, right? Next comes the experiments and confirmation, but so much of this feels intuitively RIGHT.

We make up a meta-structure of reality inside our own heads, make our own body, and see if it conforms with everyone else's. The nature of Consciousness is just the self-awareness that springs up from having told a story and seeing whether it works with the observations or whether it needs to be thrown out.

So cool.

Mind you, that's just a minor feature of the whole book, but to me, it's pure gold. :)

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I am going to demonstrate the inferiority of your intelligence to you by spouting fantastically complex and seemingly endless sentences. They will make your short-term buffer collapse, because you cannot integrate them into a single temporal gestalt anymore. You won't understand a thing, and you will have to admit that your tunnel is smaller than mine." --My favorite quote so far ;)

[Lina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I approached this book thinking it would be an integration of philosophy and neuroscience. I was somewhat disappointed. Metzinger - philosopher by profession - explains consciousness in chiefly philosophical terms, supporting his argument by cherry-picked cognitive neuroscience findings. This cherry-picking is what angered me the most, especially when combined with the moral high-ground from which the author approaches empirical science. Approved by a philosopher, hence it must be true and valid. An untested philosophical assumption is not corroborated by neuroscience findings? No, this can't be the case - they're all wrong (see part on volition and agency, for example).

Another aspect is something by which, I imagine, someone without sufficient background or interest in the field could easily by fooled. Metzinger analyses and evaluates his theory in great detail, but he only ever relates his arguments to his own idea of what he is arguing against. Take qualia, or the self. There is no little man in your head, guiding your actions, he stresses repeatedly. No, there isn't. Not a single researcher within the field has claimed that for decades. This isn't a groundbreaking revelation, nor is it busting the "myth of the self". It's like busting the myth of tooth fairies in a scientific book.

In short, if you are looking for a book on the science of consciousness, there are other books (Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and more). This is not to say they ignore philosophy - they don't, they synthesise information from different sources critically. All in all, as much as I enjoyed Metzinger's writing (I genuinely did) and some of the points, the confirmation bias is what spoiled it for me.

[Mircea Petcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Posesia" corpului, a senzațiilor și a diverselor sale părți, este fundamentală pentru impresia că ești cineva anume. Imaginea corpului tău este surprinzător de flexibilă. Schiorii experimentați, de pildă, își pot extinde imaginea corpului resimțită conștient până în vârful schiurilor. Piloții mașinilor de curse o pot extinde până ajunge să includă marginile mașinii lor; nu trebuie să aprecieze vizual dacă se pot strecura printr-o breșă, pur și simplu o simt.

Caracterul flexibil al automodelului corporal creat de creier e scos în evidență și de experiența extracorporală (OBE). OBE-urile sunt stări în care cineva trăiește iluzia foarte realistă că-și părăsește corpul fizic și se mișcă în afara lui. Cele mai multe OBE-uri apar spontan, la începutul somnului, sau ca urmare a unor accidente severe, sau în timpul operațiilor chirurgicale. Autorul insistă pe experiențele extracorporale deoarece a trăit câteva episoade și în același timp îl ajută să-și susțină propria teorie despre conștiință - teoria automodelului subiectivității.

Eu n-am trecut printr-o experiență extracorporală, în schimb am avut un vis lucid, un vis în care mi-am dat seama că visez. Visele lucide arată modul în care funcționează creierul. Creierul creează un model al realității, o reprezentare, pe care o percepem drept realitate autentică. Dacă am fi conștienți de modelul creat de creier, lumea ar arăta ca într-un vis lucid, sau în iluziile optice obișnuite, când ne dăm brusc seama că nu suntem în contact direct cu realitatea. Trăim într-o lume virtuală.

Recomand

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

What is it with philosophers? Nine times out of ten it’s not their ideas (once you’ve understood what those actually are) which are hard, it’s the language they’re “explained” in.
    The Ego Tunnel is a good example. It’s about the nature of consciousness—“tunnel” being its central metaphor, based on the “reality tunnel” concept of virtual-reality research—and Metzinger first gives us his model of consciousness, contrasting the cut-down picture of the world each of us has inside our head with the actual world outside it. He discusses some of the features of this “tunnel”; he takes a closer look at what some of the brain’s more peculiar quirks, such as “out-of-body” experiences and lucid dreaming, might be telling us; then at empathy and social cognition; and, finally, he considers some of the ethical dilemmas posed by both the creation of artificial consciousness and the alteration and/or enhancement of our own
    Fair enough, and some of the book’s ideas are interesting too. But unfortunately, its author being a philosopher, one of its most impressive features is the sheer silliness of some of the half-strangulated language used. Other parts are so woolly it’s like flying through dense fog. Why do philosophers do this? Are they sadists who enjoy dangling juicy ideas forever just out of reach? Or is it an ever-present anxiety that what they’re saying is actually utter nonsense?
    Just to emphasise: I’m not giving this a one-star rating for its content (other reviewers have given it a three, four or five, and I might have done myself if it were written in plain English); my rating is for its unreadability. It’s time professional philosophers hired professional authors to write their books.

[David Peak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this because Metzinger's philosophy of consciousness is discussed at great length in Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which is a book I am always trying to better understand. I'm fascinated by the concept of phenomenal selves, the problems of consciousness and perception, and I hoped that this book would support these ideas with a more rigorous, scientific understanding of the brain.

For the most part, The Ego Tunnel accomplishes this task, but it does so in an accessible way that I didn't find engaging. This 200-page book is basically a dumbed-down version of the much longer Being No One, and because it's written for a general audience, it tends to gloss over complex issues and ask open-ended questions rather than delve deep and search out hard answers. Don't get me wrong, there are good ideas here, they just aren't explored in a satisfying manner. On that same note, many of later chapters felt like fluff added on to meet page count, and the packaging of the book as a whole felt very commercial, like any other mainstream publishing, pop-psychology self-help book.

Overall, a frustrating experience made worthwhile by some killer ideas. I underlined quite a bit and hope to further explore Metzinger's work in the future.

[withdrawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having long since come to the conclusion that 'self' is is right up there with souls, gods, and angels, I saw The Ego Tunnel as the an opportunity to explore where philosophy and neuroscience were on the subject. While I would like to say that Metzinger gave me solid grounds for his point of view, I must say that I'm disappointed to some extent. I have two basic complaints with the book.

One is that he is very selective in his evidence gathering. He has chosen neuroscientific reports carefully to support his thesis. He does not really come to grips with theories which would contradict him.

Secondly, he often comes to somewhat tentative conclusions on the meaning of some experiments but then later uses these experiments to hold up his overall theses. I would have been more comfortable if he had been a little less cocky.

There seems to be a bit of narcissism/victim complex in Dr. Metzinger. Perhaps this comes through more because he is a professional philosopher who is exploring the fringes of his subject area in a popularized text. I have Being No One in my to-read pile and hope to get more out of it

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written by a philosopher trained in the analytic tradition and interested in neuropsychology, its ethical implications and altered states of consciousness, he himself having had out of body experiences. The text ranges. Some, particularly the portions about brain function, involves a lot of technical language, including neologisms apparently coined by the author. The concluding portions about ethics and the occasional personal reports of altered states, however, are quite readable. As regards the technical material, I'm not qualified to judge. As regards the ethical considerations, I find myself in sympathy and impressed by his concern for non-human experimental subjects. As regards the philosophical orientation, the author skirts around a reductive physicalism, giving priority to the mathematical language of physics, and avoids addressing the free will versus determinism debates head on. Personally, I got the sense that he is not quite settled in his beliefs, much of the evidential bases for which have been derived recently from relatively new fields of research. I also get the sense that he may have been much influenced by Buddhist philosophy.

[Lynne Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I obstinately resist the tunnel metaphor, --insisting on a "bubble" metaphor. Now, after thinking about this web concept based on Google's page rank technology, I am picturing an "Ego Web" -- a multidimensional, highly complex, node-interdependent web -- a web slowly constructed by our brains in conjunction with our senses to form our ego. This "web" metaphor gets rid of the time aspect of a tunnel. Time is then an ego-web construction.

After reading several books about brain structure (The Accidental Brain) and ego development (The Ego Tunnel), and one about the impetus for empathy (Inventing Human Rights), I have become fascinated by how reading, music, art give us a quick access to ways to expand our "ego tunnels." After reading The Ego Tunnel, I can clearly see the connection between building our own brain step-by-step via interactions with other people's "ego tunnels" and the huge part literature, art, music, can play in adding quickly to the stimuli we can access for building our own brain. (How many people would we have to meet before we could internalize what we get from just one Shakespeare play? Who could I randomly find out on the street to talk to who would give me the insight of, say, "Downbound Train?")

[AJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one wrote this book; no one read it either. As fascinating for some in many ways as it undoubtedly is upsetting for (most?) others, this seems to be the future either way. The question is whether these ideas/theories/hypotheses when confirmed and developed will be collectively embraced, or denied kicking and screaming all the way to our death. I am not optimistic; but I’ll be long gone before the ramifications ever get truly sorted out anyway, if “I” ever really existed in the first place.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “The Ego Tunnel” (2010) Thomas Metzinger proposes a radical thesis about the nature of consciousness and the “I”. The author suggests that what we call “consciousness” is actually a kind of reality interface generated by the brain - a “tunnel” where only certain information is filtered and presented to conscious perception. This leads to the conclusion that the “self” - the notion of a solid, cohesive “I” - is a product of brain functioning and has no independent existence beyond this internal representation.

Resenha complete em português no Nx:
https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2025/...

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty interesting book on consciousness, bringing together cognitive science, neuro, meditation and other self-experimentation approaches like lucid dreaming. Only a few times I didn't find it particularly well reasoned and convincing. My former cogsci supervisor said he didn't understand what Metzinger was talking about. I'll try to sketch a summary of what I found interesting and understandable.

Questions the book is tackling:
- what function does the thing have that we call conscious experience
- what's the relationship between conscious perception and what we call "our self"
- what follows if conscious experience is the basis of normative value

What's the ego-tunnel?
The ego-tunnel is the metaphor that Metzinger uses for describing that our conscious experience is for the most part made up of a model of the world that is organized around our first-person perspective/body/behaviour/social role/etc.. Why a tunnel? Because our model of the world is only a very lossy and simplified projection from the actual world.

Our conscious reality model is a low-dimensional projection of the unimaginably richer and more substantial physical reality that surrounds us and carries us. [all quotes translated from German]

Why I'm not a big fan of the tunnel metaphor
- a tunnel doesn't contain the idea of it being a projection of the real thing with reduced dimensionality
- a tunnel doesn't really communicate how intertwined our 'ego' is supposed to be with our world model, a tunnel sounds more like a separate thing that our 'ego' is going through
- alternatives that I like better that he uses in the book: projection and model. If I had to chose, I'd use the comparison with Tesla's approach for their auto-pilot, where the car projects the video data on a simulation of the whole traffic environment, with the car being the focal point of the simulation.

Anyway, the key is that our world model is organized around/intertwined with our 'ego', our world model is not just a stand-alone map of the territory. Very concretely, Metzinger says what we call 'I' or 'our self' is identical to the content of the map of the world that is concerned with our body/our behaviour/our social role/etc., that is: sensations, emotions, memories, actions and thoughts.

As we have already established, the ego is merely the content of our PSM at a certain point in time, at precisely that moment (our own physical sensations, our emotional state, our perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts).
(p.25)

The function of this part of our world model is to control our behavior and understand the behavior of others (can't get more specific than that). Some examples that maybe somehow fit, though I'm not super happy about them:
- evaluating possible actions that we generate while scanning our surroundings (e.g. looking at the food in the fridge, running cheap simulations of different options)
- using feedback from perception to alter the environment (e.g. dimming the light until the reflection in your screen disappears, changing the wording of a sentence so it corresponds to the content one had in mind)

Related to the ego is what Metzinger calls 'Meinigkeit' or mineness: the idea that our ego-centric world model features information about which parts of the world we can intentionally control. For example the keyboard I'm typing on would have a quality of being much stronger associated with my self/my body compared to a cloud in the sky.

On free will and being an agent
- agent: having a representation of one's values and searching for actions that satisfy them, related to counterfactual simulations
- attentional agency: having cognitive actions at one‘s disposal that direct attention
- cognitive affordances: cognitive actions that are present in a given situation, i.e. how deliberate one can steer one's stream of consciousness
- free will: result of our inability to intuitively grasp the counterfactualness of our simulations, i.e. it feels as if there are different worlds ahead of us possible, and the choice which one it will be doesn't feel determined because we're not aware of the gears behind our decisions, the option we decide for mostly just gains strength in our conscious awareness and if there is no objection from any 'higher-level' cognition the decision is handled as signed off and somehow holistically the decision of one's self

On animals and moral patienthood
Metzinger suspects that many animals also have an ego-centric world model that is similar to humans, only that the depths and levels of self-reflection are less developed, i.e. only humans develop concepts that describe experiences like hunger and then use these concepts to understand themselves and others. But if I understand correctly, he does not think developing one meta-level above the ego-centric world model is necessary for experiencing the same things we humans find normatively relevant (pain, joy, pleasure, etc.). Those still arise within the ego-centric world model and function to influence reactions, planning and learning.

Specifically about the ability to suffer, Metzinger things that the feature of mineness is central. The presence of a process that evaluates something as painful/bad/urgently avoidable needs to be modelled in our egocentric world model as applying to the self. A system that doesn't have its world model associated with an egocentric self cannot have mineness and therefore cannot suffer.

A system that does not appear to itself cannot suffer because it has no sense of mineness.

Here I wondered what Metzinger would say about meditators who claim to lose their sense of self, who describe their experience as being without center and without borders. Or for that matter people on psychedelics. How I understand it (and can partially confirm), the feeling of mineness can dissolve, but there still can be (immense) suffering. A prototype would be something like "I dissolved into an ocean of fear" or something like that.

Related: Skepticism about losing meditators losing their sense of self
Maybe Metzinger would call into question the validity of those reports. Later in the book, he warned the reader to be sceptical about people claiming they lost their sense of self and handed out a 'gotcha' that I found confusing. Paraphrasing: "Oh, you wrote a book about how you don't have a self anymore? Well, I guess this book was written by nobody then. Boom."

Relevant quote from the book:

Second, there is a simple logical problem that has to be kept in mind. If one only picks out the main phenomenological feature found in many accounts of enlightenment experiences - namely the dissolution of the self, the complete disappearance of the sense of self - then there is no reason to believe reports of such states because they are self-contradicting. If there was no self at all, who is it telling us about this experience? If the experiencing subject has really dissolved, how can there even be an autobiographical memory for the period in question? How am I supposed to be able to remember a state in which I as a conscious self did not exist at all? This is another reason why reports of enlightenment experiences may not be as interesting as some think. But it is precisely this point that connects the serious spiritual practitioner with the perspective of science.

1) Maybe you can resolve it by interpreting the loss of a sense of self as the loss of a feeling of mineness? I'd speculate that you don't need to feel like a part of your egocentric world model belongs to your self to have the ability to talk?
2) A slightly different way to resolve it might be that people without a sense of self get rid of the idea that their egocentric world model is partially their ego and partially the world. That's how I think about it: my conscious experience has a spacious character that normally seems like it's centred somewhere around my head, with my self being the thing that is located in a blob around this centre and the rest is the outside world. And this centredness can give away and result in the same experience only that it's not centred, and that the sensory experiences in my egocentric world model don't "point"/"flow"/are not "directed" towards the centre anymore. This is related to the idea of naive realism: in my normal mode, I feel like everything outside of my self-blob is actual outside physical reality, and not a reconstruction.

On controlling others
While talking about the mineness regarding the objects in your current surroundings that one can control, Metzinger mentions in passing that these controllable objects might also include other people. He thinks we sometimes model the behaviors and mental states of others as being under our control the same way we control our hands. This reminded me of a dimension in social interactions that varies between something like "the conversation is free flowing and I feel very easygoing" to "very stiff and awkward, one person behaves in ways that noticeably violate expectations and preferences of the other person". I expect that the latter extreme sometimes is caused by the brain of at least one person to control the interaction too much, to noticeably invest mental energy to make the other person feel a certain way or believe a certain thing, and to get slightly frustrated by the other person not satisfactorily reacting according to plan.

The eternal playlist a.k.a. the boring experience machine
Metzinger reports data from a cool thought experiment: Imagine after you die you'll stay conscious and for eternity randomly live through a playlist of conscious experiences that you selected from your lifetime. Metzinger wonders what proportion of conscious experiences in your normal life people would include in such a playlist. He did this with a bunch of students and the answer seems to be around 30ish% (iirc). But now Metzinger wants to conclude that this means that the majority of everyday conscious experiences are not worth living. Just one way it doesn't follow: To maximize the total utility of the eternal playlist, I should just pick the moment of most pleasure. Something something secretary problem?

Some things I didn't really understand
At some parts I didn't understand so well, especially in chapter 2. For example he seems to think that an internal clock is a key design feature of the brain, without which different parts would process information from different times in parallel. It sounded like he's imagining the visual pathways processing information from an hour ago while we reflect on a thought from yesterday while smelling the toast from breakfast? Fairly confident I just didn't get it. E.g.:

Although strictly speaking there is no such thing as "now" in the outside world, it has proven adaptive and beneficial to organize the inner model of the world around such a now - by having a common time frame for all mechanisms in the brain so that they can all access the same information at the same time. A certain point in time had to be represented in a privileged way so that it could be identified as "the reality".

A very shallow fact check about Metzinger's claims about the origins of religion
Metzinger claims that religion has its origins in coping mechanism around one's own mortality.

And, historically speaking, religion emerged from burial rites, grave goods and ancestral cults, that is, from systematic forms of denial of mortality - coping strategies with regard to one's own finitude.

I only skimmed the Wikipedia on the history of religion and they only mention supernatural ideas (like believe in spirits) and standing in awe of the grand and mysterious world as psychological factors. Metzinger doesn't cite this claim further, which made it seem like a careless and strong assertion in a domain that seems very difficult to make strong assertions about.

[Marko Bojkovský · Rating 3 out of 5]

Knjige se čitati moraju. I loše knjige. I knjige koje nam se gade. I knjige sa kojima se svađamo. I knjige na koje režimo. I one što vređaju sve ono što smatramo "dubokim ubeđenjima" (mada, mi ne preporučujemo imanje baš tako dubokih ubeđenja, jer protivno takvim dubokim ubeđenjima, njihovi vlasnici često ostaju plitki). "Ego tunel" nije u stanju da nas iznervira, nadamo se da je malo takvih ostalo na ovom svetu, odnosno da smo se mi lišili takve pahuljaste strukture ega, ali jeste nas uspešno mučila minulih dana i nedelja. Tomas Mecinger ovoj knjizi pristupa kao spoju filozofije uma i moderne neourologije. To je, naravno, u redu. Filozof ne može opstati u pre-naučnom vakuumu i ignoristai krajnjeg poštovanja vredne domete savremene nauke, ostvarene tokom nekoliko minulih vekova. Ukratko, što neke od Vas već ovde može odvratiti, on je slika i prilika modernog mislioca na tom polju filozofije - materijalista, redukcionista. Takvi još uvek čine ubedljivu većinu unutar filozofske, akademske zajednice. Svest je slučajni produkt evolucije, materijalnih zbivanja u mozgu. Samosvest je iluzija, odnosno selektovana virtuelna realnost koju mozak formira i pušta u takozvani ego tunel u kojem smo "mi" zarobljeni (makar dok se identifikujemo sa samosvešću, dok mislimo da smo ego ili sopstvo). Naš osnovni problem i muka sa ovom knjigom jeste da je ona većinom svog sadržaja predstavlja selektivno izabrane eksperimente koji idu u korist osnovnim tezama, što se suštinski alterative redukcionizmu ni ne pominju, ali pre svega to što je - dosadna i suvoparna za čitanje. Ovo dobrim delom više i nije filozofija, nego nekakvog post-filozofsko delovanje koje jedva da je nauci potrebno. Ipak, vratićemo se na našu uvodnu rečenicu - knjige se moraju čitati.

Ego tunel, autorov termin, je pomalo nesretne metafora za zapravo prilično tužnu istinu redukcionističkog materijalizma - ništa sem prirode ne postoji, no i sama priroda nam je, suštinski transcedentna. Svest je tunel u koji mozak šalje ono što "misli" da treba da šalje. Uzećemo primer proste percepcije objekata u vanjskom svetu - maksimalno pojednostavljeno, možemo reći da percepcija, odnosno čulni stimulans izaziva treperenja, osciliranje neurona u određenim delovima mozga. Ipak, potrebno je da dođe do takvih aktivnosti na više mesta, na većoj površini mozga kako bi ti opažaji zapravo dospeli u ego tunel. Dakle, mnogi opažaji se zanemarivaju na "podsvesnom" nivou kao nedovoljno bitni, jaki... Mi od sveta znamo samo ono što "moramo" da znamo. Uvek je to virtuelna, subjektivna realnost, koju doživljavamo sa određenim zakašnjenjem. Uvek živimo u prošlom vremenu. Prošlom za onoliko milisekunda koliko je mozgu potrebno da šalje obrađene podatke u svest.

Autor u prvoj trećini knjige piše o nekolicini pitanja i problema kojima se bavi moderna neurologija i filozofija uma. Daje nam redukcionističke odgovora na pitanja kako nastaje jedinstveni, perzistentni svet u kojem ležemo, u koji se budimo i u kojem, makar tako izgleda, deluju i druga svesna bića. Navodi interesantne eksperimente koji pokazuju sa koliko uspeha ljudi mogu u svoj "telesni model" da integrišu strane, nežive predmete (kao što je gumena ruka ili čak samo refleksija desne ruke kod pacijenata koji su izgubili levu). Dalje se bavi pitanjima sadašnjeg trenutka, uopšte evolutivne važnosti svesti, empatije , slobodne volje... Objavljuje i nekoliko razgovora sa neurolozima... Sve to deluje pomalo kao da je pokušavao da nakrpi sadržaja.

Tek pred kraj nam golica malo više um postavljanjem raznih etičkih pitanja koja proizilaze iz raznih domašaja nauke o mozgu i svesti. Bavi se pitanjima psihoaktivnih, halucinogenih droga i njihovom legalizacijom i korišćenjem uprkos mogućnosti (kod nekoliko korisnika u hiljadu) razvijanja teških psihoza, jer nasuprot tim neželjenim dejstvima stoje stotine korisnika koji javljaju da su te supstance promenile njihov život, da su iskustva "na njima" neka od najvažnijih spiritualnih iskustava ili čak najvažnija u njihovim životima. Ukratko iscrtava viziju promene obrazovanja u budućnosti, neophodnosti učenja dece meditaciji, medijskoj higijeni uma... Kao i pitanjima veštačke inteligencije, odnosno veštačke post-biološke svesti i moralnosti delovanja na tom polju, tačnije nemoralnosti takvih eksperimenata. Da li bi bilo moralno i opravdano stvarati samosvesne mašine koje su naša kopija? Mašine koje, poput nas, jesu sposobne da pate? Ili je stvaranje mašina večnog blagoslova bolje? Da li bi ljudi mogli i hteli postati iste takve mašine? Na neuronskom nivou eliminisati patnju?

Materijalizam i redukcionizam su na površini laki. Filozofski laki (u njihov razvoj je ugrađeno mnogo mukotrpnog, kolektivnog naučnog rada). Od najmanjih, najjednostavnijih stvari razvijaju se kompleksniji i kompleksniji. Negde usput se stvara svest, a kod čoveka i samosvest - ego. Ego kakvim ga mi osećamo mora biti iluzija, produkt fizičkih čestica u našem mozgu, koji je tek evolucijska prilagodba na spošljašni svet. Ne može postojati perzistentno Ja, već samo vazda promenljiva prikaza spoljašnjeg sveta. Stvar je u tome što se mi sa ovime načelno slažemo. Individualno Ja je iluzija, to nas uči i Mahajana Budizam i Upanišadski korpus misli, Advaita Vedanta oslonjena na te spise, Daoizam, mnogi mističari diljem sveta i vremena i religijskih tradicija, kao i mnogi skriveniji oblici velikih zapadnih religijskih tradicija (Sufi, Kabala, hrišćanski misticizam...). Ono što neurologija i materijalističke teorije uma rade jeste objašnjavaju kako se ta iluzija odvija, kakvi su to konkretni fizički procesi unutar mozga. Koji se deo gnjecavog organa zasija kada vidimo, čujemo,. dodirujemo, sanjamo, doživljavamo mistične ekstaze u dubokoj meditaciji, vodimo ljubav... To je u redu, to je korisno. Divim se ljudima koji odluče time da se bave, nadam se da mi neće u životu trebati, ali im se divim. Nama je knjiga bila najubedljivija, njeni osnovni argumenti najefektnije izvedeni onda kada se navode primeri obolelih ljudi, odnosno ljudi kod kojih se integrisani modeli sopstva, sveta, vremena raspadaju. Fizičke povrede mozda dovode do toga da ljudi ne mogu da dožive celoviti svet kakvim ga mi, zdravi, vidimo, ili gube individualni identitet, ne mogu razaznati san od jave... To su za nas dovoljni dokazi postojanja "ego tunela", no čini nam se da su navedene drevne tradicije to odavno dokazale.

Najveća zamerka nam je potpuno ignorisanje i danas živih alternativa i unutar zapadne savremene misli o umu. Nasuprot redukcionističkom materijalizmu kojeg Mecinger ovde predstavlja kao jedinu mogućnosti, stoji ništa više sa naukom u sukobu - panpsihizam. Nećemo na ovom mestu širiti priču, niti generalno vidimo konkretno filozofsko stanovište kao sretnu alternativu (možda tek korak u pravom smeru). Činjenica da ne postoji čovečuljak u našoj glavi nije nova i nije od posebne važnosti, ali mogućnost postojanja nadindividualnog jedinstva svesti koja je transcedentna i/ili imanentna ili pak ideja da svest kreće od najnižih gradivnih elemenata fizičkog sveta (npr, elektroni, strune, štagod), preko biljaka (a možda i određenih sasvim na oko neživih objekata), pa sve do životinja i ljudi se nama ne čini ništa luđim od materijalističkog muka na tu temu. Od panpsihizma do nekakvog oblika panteizma ima već mnogo, odatle do nekakvih ozbiljnih učenja o nadindividualnoj monističkoj svesti još i mnogo više. Ipak, bilo koja od tih stanica je plauzabilna koliko i primitivni materijalizam, bez obzira koliko je scijentifička revolucija i uzurpacija misli čovečanstvo dovela u intelektualni ćorsokakm ostavljajući ih nesposobnim da uopšte tako nešto zamisle.

Više puta do sada smo isticali da je, za nas, filozofija već pozni i nepotpuni oblik ljudskog nadiindividualnog delovanja. Za nas ostaje drevna vizija Mudraca onaj ideal, arhetip u kome je saliveno sve ono što je zapravo ljudsko, ono što nas ljudima čini. Kod Mudraca su u jedno stopljene i filozofija i religija i pesništvo, ne prostim zbiranjem današnjih, odavno ojađenih kategorija, jer danas su sve tri navedene kategorije tolik odegenerisane u odnosu na izvor, da njihovo zbiranje više nema nikakvog smisla (mada je i više kategorija skupljeno u Mudraca, samo neke od njih su medicina, tehnologija, nauka, no njih ipak možemo da izostavimo jer današnji, obezduhovljeni, materijalistički oblici tih mudračkih delovanja donose vanredne rezultate, sve dok nisu sve što čovek čini i što čoveka čini). Filozofija koja je pokidana od izvora (na zapadu praktično Platon i sva post-platonovska misao) je zanimljiva i vredna tek sporadično i relativno. Njome se, makar u prošlosti, jesu bavili veliki umovi, pa su i dometi njihovih radova veliki, iako često, gotovo uvek, sa u samu srž ugrađenim greškama, odnosno limitiranostima, baš zato što su od izvora odsečeni. Bez pojma o Univerzalnom, valjani zahvati filozofije u diferencirano i individualno se neminovno okončavaju na njima, bez ikakvih posledica na ljudsko shvatanje Univerzalnog. Kada je situacija već takva, kada filozofi nisu više i pesnici, niti imaju duboke metafizičke uvide, a kada se pritom bave temama koje za nas nisu od ključne važnosti i to na način koji je nama stran i teško da može biti dalji od naše slike Mudraca, onda je pred nama mučenje na par stotina stranica. Pa, ipak, eto nas ovde gde preporučujemo knjigu. Mecinger nije pesnik. nije dobar pisac, nismo oduševljeni ni njegovom filozofskom oštricom. Ipak, ne možemo osporiti informisanost, širinu građe, ubedljivost argumenata... Korisnost u širem kontekstu samoobrazovanja i razvoja individue - nikako kao krajnja stanica, ali stanica na putu. Preporučujemo je svima koji vole da misle o pročitanom, da se sa njime raspravljaju, manje ili više informisano, manje ili više bahato (mi moramo sebe kritikovati ovde, bilo je jače od nas, ušli smo u raspravu sa daleko obrazovanijim čovekom).

Drevni Mudraci su znali ili naslućivali stvari koje Mecinger zahvaljujući kolektivitetu moderne nauke zna. Ipak, bili su daleko oprezniji od njega. Svesni da takva znanja, onome ko je nepripremljen, mogu naškoditi, a posledično razoriti čitavo društvo. Prvi put smo se sa time dotakli čitajući spise Bude Sidarte i Nagarđune (budističkog mislioca koji je vekovima nakon Sidarte nanovo pročistio učenje, uverio nas u prazninu praznine). Buda je bio prvi nepotpuni mudrac Istoka. Razjareno i besno je jurcao okolo i vikao stvari ne toliko suprotne od onoga što danas viču Mecingeri sveta. Ipak, iza Budinog učenja je sloboda od sveta. Materijalizam nas stavlja u kavez sopstvenog mozga, u svet laži iz kojeg nema izlaza.

Razarenja individualnog Ja je najveći i najteži zadatak kojeg se čovek može prihvatiti, i to bivajući svestan da najverovatnije neće uspeti u potpunosti i da to čak i nije potrebno (poželjno). U tome je cela svrsishodnost ovakvih knjiga. I sa naučne, eskperimentalne, rigorozne tačke gledišta naše nauke, jasno vidimo koliko je iskustvo individualiteta, moga Ja, sopstva, varljivo i lažno. Posebno su zanimljivi i delovi o "mističnim stanjima", na primer "vantelesnim iskustvima" gde ljudi u prilikom snevanja "izlaze" iz svojih tela... Naravno, ne postoji lična esencij koja može napustiti telo. Mozak u stanju, da tako kažemo, nepotpune aktiviranosti, ne može više da stvara kompletan model sveta u kojem je povezan prostor, model našeg tela, pojam o vremenu i tako dalje, pa dolazi do razorenih, isprekidanih predstava o slikama koje su nam od ranije poznati - eterično Ja bez tela pluta po svetu koji je nalik onom u kojem smo zapsali, ali uvek se mogu pronaći određene rušpe, mane, greške il isamo prekidi, distance ništa ne znače... Čak isam isnovi , koje je svako definitivno iskusio, isto to - nedovoljno precizne i ubedljive iluzije. Individualno Ja je najveći teret koji nosimo, a pritom je laž.

Ipak, moramo primetiti par stvari. Humanizam, nacionalizam, liberalizam, feminizam, socijalizam i sve druge emancipatorske ideologije nastaju na zapadu, na temeljima judeo-hrišćanske tradicije koja, barem u narodskim oblicima, insistira na postojanju individualne duše i besmrtnosti takve duše (tek u dubljim, skrivenijim ili danas izbrisanim pod-tradicijama se granica između ljudske duše i boga polako briše), takvih humanih ideja nema na istoku. Stvaranja takvih novih vrednosti nema više ni na zapadu (surogat u obliku nervoznog propagiranja transrodnih prava nećemo računati u ozbiljne ideje o jednakosti). Šta želimo reći, razaranje lažnog Ega - da, ali pitanje je šta ostaje iza toga? Materijalizam toliko lišen intelektualnog promišljaja, bivajući bolno uštrojen jeftinim (lažlljivim) racionalizmom ne može ništa ponuditi do pustinje. Budizam je jednako opor i težak, ali nudi mir, razrešenje želje - Slobodu. Posao neuorologa nije da nam daje takve izlaze, oni svoj posao perfektno rade (s tim da neki ubeđeno pričaju o stvarima za koje nemaju nikakve dokaze), filozofi koji na njihovom radu parazitiraju i grle materijalističke teorije uma su nam korisni tek toliko da nam približe sva ta saznanja i da nam, iako to ne žele, posredno ocrtaju razloge permanentene krize našeg doba.

Ako posle ove knjige osetite blagu depresiju, uzmite Upanišade ili "Tao te đing".

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eine neue Philosophie des Selbst, verspricht der Untertitel. Bewusstes Erleben, sagte der Autor, gleicht einem Tunnel. „Was wir sehen und hören oder ertasten [...], ist nur ein kleiner Bruchteil dessen, was tatsächlich in der Außenwelt existiert. Unser bewusstes Wirklichkeitsmodell ist eine niedrigdimensionale Projektion der unvorstellbar reicheren und gehaltvollen physikalischen Wirklichkeit, die uns umgibt und uns trägt.“ Und das bewusste Erleben ist weniger ein Abbild der „als vielmehr ein Tunnel durch die Wirklichkeit.“ (S. 23)

Na schön. Der Tunnel als Metapher, warum nicht, aber mit Metaphern kann man sich auch schnell verrennen. Was soll ich mir unter der "inneren Landschaft des Ego-Tunnels" vorstellen? (S. 17)

Was ist Bewusstsein? Interessanterweise verzichtet Metzinger auf eine Definition. Außer man lässt „Bewusstsein ist das Erscheinen einer Welt“ (S.33) oder „Bewusstsein ist Innerlichkeit in der Zeit“ (S. 61) als Definition durchgehen. Aber offenbar ist es etwas, das die moderne Wissenschaft, und zwar natürlich Neurophysiologen und Philosophen im Verbund, inzwischen versteht, zumindest beinahe.

Und das wirft die Frage auf, was man als Erklärung akzeptiert. Zum Beispiel so etwas: „... dass eine Bindung von Eigenschaften genau dann auftritt, wenn im Gehirn weit entfernte Nervenzellen, die die Reflexion des Lichts, die Oberflächeneingenschaften, und, sagen wir, das Gewicht dieses Buchs darstellen, damit beginnen, zusammen zu tanzen, indem sie gleichzeitig feuern. Dieses rhythmische Muster des Feuers erzeigt eine kleine zusammenhängende Wolke in Ihrem Gehirn, ein Netzwerk aus Neuronen, die einen einzelnen Gegenstand – das Buch – für Sie darstellen...“

So ist das also, tanzen, indem sie feuern... Etwas verstehen bedeutet Metaphern zu akzeptieren, schon klar, aber das ist mir zu wenig. Mag sein, dass das Buch für den Laien geschrieben ist, und dass die „führenden Fachleute“, von denen Metzinger immer spricht (sich selbst einschließend) untereinander eine präzisere Sprache sprechen.

Der empirische Beweis, übrigens, „für die Existenz von Bewusstsein bei Tieren ist mittlerweile jenseits jedes vernünftigen Zweifels.“ (S. 34) Schade, dass mir mein unvernünftiger Zweifel nicht mit einem Halbsatz genommen wird. In der Anmerkung zu der Behauptung wird auf eine seiner eigenen Arbeiten verwiesen. Und zudem gesagt, dass es Hinweise(!) gebe, die die Existenz von primären Bewusstsein bei Oktopoden recht plausibel(!) machen. (S. 414)

Als ich das las, kam mir das irgendwie intellektuell unredlich vor. Und das ist deshalb interessant, (auch wenn das etwas vom Thema wegführt), weil der Autor im Nachwort eine Lanze für die intellektuelle Redlichkeit bricht. Da nennt er als Beispiel die Frage nach der Existenz Gottes. Es gebe nach 2500 Jahren Philosophiegeschichte kein einziges überzeugendes Argument für die Existenz Gottes. Und die Beweislast sei auf Seiten der Theisten. Eine solche Aussage finde ich unredlich. Denn a) kennt er vielleicht nicht alle Argumente und b) hat er vielleicht die, die er kennt nicht verstanden. Vielleicht ist der ontologische Gottesbeweis schlüssig. Glaubte immerhin Leibniz. Vielleicht ist nur der Begriff des notwendig existierend Wesens in sich widersprüchlich. Das aber würde zumindest die Beweislast umkehren. Ich sage nicht, dass es so ist, nur, dass Philosophie nicht so einfach ist, wie Metzinger zu glauben scheint.

In diesem Buch ist weiterhin viel von den Träumen des Autors und seinen außenkörperlichen Erfahrungen die Rede. Nicht, dass so etwas nicht zur Erhellung des Bewusstseinproblems beitragen könnte, aber ich fand das aufdringlich und unangebracht.

Die Frage, ob Roboter Bewusstsein erlangen können und welche ethischen Fragen damit verbunden sind, ist bestimmt wichtig. Leider interessieren sie mich sehr wenig. Ob man mit Drogen das Bewusstsein verbessern kann und wenn ja, ob man es sollte, leider ebensowenig. (Zufällig lese ich parallel ein Buch von Walker Percy, in dem diese Frage innerhalb einer Romanhandlung, gestellt wird.)

5/10

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Хорошо о современном состоянии дел в понимании процессов мышления и самосознании. Поиск места где сойдутся биология и философия. Где в человеке существует сознание - тоннель эго.

[Jackson Childs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metzinger is obviously very well informed about the latest research in consciousness. The most valuable part of this book is his synthesis of this research into his theory of the “ego tunnel”. He provides a plausible, step-by-step argument for how the brain generates the mind. For that alone the book is worth reading.

However, the book has some major problems. It could be that some of these problems arise because of Metzinger’s intention to write a book for the general reader, and that consequently Metzinger struggled to find the right tone and the right level of detail. But the result is a flawed book. The primary flaw is the shallowness and inconsistency of the philosophical gloss he attempts to put on his theory.

First, Metzinger does a poor job contextualizing his theory. The way he presents his arguments, it can seem as if the theory of the “ego tunnel” just is the standard theory of consciousness in cutting edge neuroscience. He never mentions alternative theories and he always presents other people’s research as if it directly confirms his theory. This is a serious problem because, although I’m not an expert in the field, I’m sure there are any number of alternative theories. In particular, Metzinger at best only briefly nods to the idea that consciousness is shaped by culture. What he doesn’t talk about is that what he considers the primary mystery of consciousness, its subjectivity, the self-consciousness at its heart, is arguably a quite recent development of western civilization. The book would have been improved by at least acknowledging some alternative viewpoints, and that the “ego tunnel” is his synthesis of recent research.

Metzinger also struggles in characterising his theory. He writes on page 20,

"there has been considerable progress, but as far as our conscious minds are concerned, we still live in prehistoric times. Our theories about consciousness are as naïve as the first ideas cavemen probably had about the true nature of the stars. Scientifically, we are at the very beginning of a true science of consciousness."(20)

But the style of much of the rest of the book, particularly the end, belies this seemingly humble evaluation of the status of consciousness research. He writes confidently of the “three phases” of a “consciousness revolution, says the first phase is well under way and implies the other two are right around the corner, and he then pretends to speak quite seriously about the social and ethical dangers of this rapid progress. There is a confusion of perspectives here that is characteristic of the book.

For instance, he writes

"The straightforward philosophical answer to the widespread fear that philosophers or scientists will “reduce consciousness” is that reduction is a relationship between theories, not phenomena. No serious empirical researcher and no philosopher wants to “reduce consciousness”; at best, one theory about how the contents of conscious experience arose can be reduced to another theory." (18)

Well, that’s a relief. Except that it’s very hard to match this statement with the explicitly stated intention of the book. He frames the entire book as an argument about the non-existence of anything we would recognize as a self. That’s not reducing one theory to another. That’s eliminating something. He writes, in the opening sentences:

"In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness-that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object-if we don’t come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world." (1)

Even if we set aside Metzinger’s apparent desire to have it both ways with “reduction”, this lay reader struggles to understand this philosophical project when the bulk of the book describes how the brain creates what Metzinger calls the

"phenomenal self-model (PSM)-the conscious model of the organism as a whole that is activated by the brain. The content of the PSM is the Ego. The PSM of Homo sapiens is probably one of nature’s best inventions. It is an efficient way to allow a biological organism to consciously conceive of itself (and others) as a whole. Thus it enables an organism to interact with its internal world as well as with the external environment in an intelligent and holistic manner….Our evolved type of conscious self-model is unique to the human brain, in that by representing the process of representation itself, we can catch ourselves-as Antonio Damasio would call it-in the act of knowing. We mentally represent ourselves as representational systems, in phenomenological real-time. This ability turned us into thinkers of thoughts and readers of minds…" (4-5).

So it’s hard to see how all of this theorizing about the phenomenal self-model and the “ego tunnel” constitute evidence for the contention that there is no such thing as a self. It’s easy to imagine theorists using the very same data to argue just the opposite! “Experiments prove the self has a neurological basis”! In fact the only real arguments on behalf of this claim are as follows:

"It must be emphasized that although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no little man running things in our head. The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-organization on many levels. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge. But no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological organism, as such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of representational content-namely the content of a transparent self-model activated in the organism’s brain." (8)

Other than the hand waving about “biological data formats” and the curious argument that because something is a representation it isn’t real (which would mean not just selves are unreal, but the entirety of human and animal consciousness), the only solid point I can find here is that “there is no little man running things in our head”. I’m sold on that, but Metzinger seems unwilling or unable to deal with the more complex implications of his own theory of phenomenal self-models. His philosophical perspective seems greatly more muddled than he wants to admit.

"But whereas the Ego is only an appearance, it would be false to say that it is an illusion; metaphors are always limited. All of this is happening on a very basic level in our brains….On this fundamental level, which forms the preconditions of knowing something, truth and falsity do not yet exist, nor is there an entity that could count as the creator of an illusion. And there is no entity that could count as the subject of the illusion either. There is nobody in the system who could be mistaken or confused about anything-the homunculus does not exist. We have only the dynamical self-organization of a new coherent structure-namely, the transparent self-model in the brain-and this is what it means to be no one and an Ego Machine at the same time. In sum and on the level of phenomenology as well as on the level of neurobiology, the conscious self is neither a form of knowledge nor an illusion. It just is what it is." (209)

The conclusion is not exactly crystalline in its clarity. The self just is what it is, except that it’s not.

Faced with such a seemingly obvious gap between the philosophical promises and the product of the book, one is forced to speculate about the reasons for this gap. Various anti-dualistic arguments could perhaps be interpolated by the sophisticated reader, but even if we suppose such arguments as given, I can’t make sense of Metzinger’s assertion of the non-existence of selves beyond the plain statement that there are no homunculi. But I suspect there is an even deeper confusion, at least at the level of the text, about more basic philosophical questions.

He writes that the idea of an Ego Tunnel is based on the older idea of a “reality tunnel”.

"The general idea is this: Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel”. We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain….the construction process is largely invisible; in the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are completely unaware of this fact." (9)

Metzinger then critiques this perspective:

"From a philosopher’s point of view, there is a lot of nonsense in this popular notion. We don’t create an individual world but only a world-model. Moreover, the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only be using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is." (9)

And yet, Metzinger repeatedly uses just such a folkloric concept of “objective reality” to describe the consequences of consciousness research. This “nonsense” is used to characterize the “ego tunnel” as a whole:

"The conscious brain is a biological machine-a reality engine-that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all….out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation…"(20)

He goes on in this way. One could perhaps try to interpret the book by saying that, setting aside the contradictory statements about reality, it is the constructed nature of consciousness which makes the self unreal. But then it would be completely unclear why anything at all, any content of consciousness whatsoever, is not also unreal. And then, one could perhaps stretch even farther and say that Metzinger attempts to wall off certain acts of consciousness:

"Of course, an external world does exist, and knowledge and action do causally connect us to it-but the conscious experience of knowing, acting, and being connected is an exclusively internal affair." (23)

Maybe, and this is being generous, he has something in mind about specifically internal aspects of consciousness and their consequent non-reality. There is some support for this in the way Metzinger treats the supposed non-reality of the conscious will. That’s the best I can do. But such an interpretation would rapidly fall apart given Metzinger’s insistence on the total internality of all of consciousness.

As far as conscious thought, what Gilbert Ryle might call self-talk, Metzinger offers very little beyond some broad and again, to this reader, fairly inconsistent descriptions. There’s really no work done to integrate thinking with the perhaps lower level phenomenal consciousness which Metzinger does pretty well in covering. This creates a particular problem in the discussion of conscious will, which I won’t go into.

So to sum up, the philosophical side of this book is greatly muddled. I just didn’t buy it. I’m willing to believe that Metzinger has some world class philosophy at his disposal, I can’t find it in this book. Although he has some interesting thoughts about the future social consequences of consciousness research, it’s hard to take some of his bolder statements very seriously, as they come after the general failure of the book to persuade this reader of his program.

[Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book by way of science fiction author Peter Watts, whose excellent novel Blindsight was influenced by Thomas Metzinger’s philosophy. The Ego Tunnel is the best book I’ve read about consciousness since Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind . Damasio and Metzinger have much in common, but I ultimately prefer Metzinger’s approach; as a neuroscientist, Damasio focuses mostly on the technical issues of how consciousness is constructed, whereas Metzinger’s philosophical background prompts him to explicitly to link our current knowledge about consciousness to relevant social, political, and ethical concerns. The Ego Tunnel explores a bevy of neuroscientific evidence––including but not limited to information about out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, meditation, brain disorders, and artificial intelligence––to probe our deepest questions about what consciousness is, how it occurs, and how our understanding of it might reshape human experience and culture.

Metzinger’s pet metaphor for describing consciousness is an extremely effective tool for readers seeking to build abstract models of their own thinking processes. The Ego Tunnel creates for us the appearance of a world, “a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us…The ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality” (6, emphasis his). Thinking of one’s conscious experience as lived through a tunnel has a lot of advantages if we are trying to understand and expose (insofar as is possible) the representative models our brains construct in order to present the world to us and help us interact with it. Tunnels have walls on all sides and are typically traversed in a linear fashion. These features map onto human experience, a phenomenon which is comprehensively mediated and enabled by self-generated representations that carry us inexorably forward in time. The commonplace notion of the “end of the tunnel” is also the termination of this metaphor’s usefulness: We never “get out” of the Ego Tunnel, because we are the Ego Tunnel. (Arguably, death involves leaving the tunnel, but since there is no good reason to believe experience is possible after death, there is little hope of discovering what it would be like to escape the tunnel with our identity and/or sensory faculties intact.)

While the tunnel metaphor effectively illustrates the forward momentum of consciousness through time, it fails to adequately capture another essential element of that journey, which is how brains construct the illusion of a consistent personal identity. This feature, which Damasio calls the “autobiographical self,” is responsible for tracking the narrative of one’s life and weaving stories––some true, some false––about who we are, who we’ve been, and who we might be in the future. Metzinger has many interesting things to say about consciousness, but is surprisingly taciturn when it comes to this critical component of our lived experience. He prefers to focus on consciousness as it occurs in particular, discreet moments, rather than how it creates a self-reflective narrative over the course of a lifetime. He prefers to focus on consciousness as it occurs in particular, discreet moments, rather than how it creates a self-reflective narrative over the course of a lifetime.

This oversight is likely a contributing factor to Metzinger’s tenuous assertion that humans do not actually possess “selves.” This is not a novel idea, especially for a philosopher, and the pages spent on this topic are actually among the dullest in this otherwise concise and fascinating book. Metzinger suggests we should redefine the self as a “process” rather than a static entity (also not a novel philosophical idea): “As long as the life process––the ongoing process of self-stabilization and self-sustainment––is reflected in a conscious Ego Tunnel, we are indeed selves. Or rather, we are ‘selfing’ organisms” (208). I take this to mean that, like myriad thinkers who came before him, Metzinger is simply refuting the idea of the immutable soul, or of the self as a fixed and/or immaterial locus of identity. Contrary to his claim, Metzinger has not proved that humans don’t possess selfhood, but rather that selfhood arises in a much different way than Western thinkers have traditionally posited (and let’s not forget that Eastern thinkers had this figured out millennia ago!). Even if we buy Metzinger’s arguments wholesale, it still seems both accurate and expedient to say people have selfhood. The difference is that we now understand selfhood as a phenomenological consequence of how our material bodies are structured––a semantic and conceptual shift rather than an empirical one.

Even if Metzinger fails to disprove the existence of selves, this book is worth reading solely for the artistry with which he describes the Ego Tunnel. Although he sometimes repeats himself unnecessarily, Metzinger has a tremendous talent for using language to break down mechanisms of consciousness, employing effective examples along the way (many of which include prompting the reader to think about how his or her brain is actively simulating the experience of interacting with the text). Reading the first few chapters of this book was about as close as I’ve ever come to a text-induced hallucination; I remember looking up from the page once or twice and surveying my kitchen, delightfully skeptical about the veracity of everything I was seeing. There were also times I began to see ghostly tunnel walls appear in my peripheral vision––an experience I’ve had in the past, but not while reading. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

"The conscious brain is a biological machine––a reality engine––that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all. It is just as your physics teacher in high school told you: Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality. What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance. For your conscious eyes only." (20, emphasis his)

As Metzinger acknowledges, he isn’t describing anything outside the valence of a high school physics class; nevertheless, a chill went through me when I read, “The evening sky is colorless.” I know this is true, but I don’t think about it very often, mostly because it’s not a pragmatically useful piece of information. Still, I don’t want to underestimate the potential of such statements, pedestrian as they may be for educated readers, to generate moments of clarity and creativity that are hard to come by from inside the maze of our quotidian habits. The Ego Tunnel rarely shows its borders or hints at anything external to itself, so taking a moment to dissolve into those peripheral parts of our lived experience is both fun and enlightening.

The fact that the experience of reading this book was so enjoyable (as opposed to a simple assessment of how informative it was) bespeaks Metzinger’s preoccupation with the phenomenology of consciousness. While there are conflicting views about the importance of phenomenology when it comes to constructing a theory of consciousness, for now I am firmly in the camp of Metzinger and others who believe that our experience of ourselves––regardless of how much it may sometimes diverge from scientific observations––is a hugely important part of the consciousness puzzle. That is because phenomenology is quite literally where we live. Even the best neuroscientists don’t escape their own Ego Tunnels: they interact with carefully cultivated and highly accurate representations of reality, not with reality itself. Moreover, experience is paramount when trying to use empirical findings to improve human societies, because it doesn’t much matter if we improve things by some quantitative or “objective” standard if people’s actual experience of being alive isn’t positively affected.

The main reason we should take seriously the phenomenological component of the consciousness question has to do with what Metzinger calls “transparency”:

"Transparency simply means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us…We do not see neurons firing away in our brain but only what they represent for us. A conscious world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model––we look right through it, directly onto the world, as it were." (7)

This is another idea I’ve come across many times, but Metzinger’s language helped me internalize it in what felt like a brand new way. I think I originally became fascinated with neuroscience because it helped lift the veil somewhat on the transparent workings of my own mind and the minds of others. Because our brains present us with a hyper-realistic illusion of direct contact with the world, it is incredible to me that we’ve been able to draw up at least a basic blueprint of the virtually invisible mental mechanisms that generate this phenomenon. Additionally, the persistence of these transparent mechanisms ensures that, at least for now, we have to take seriously the ways in which our experience of being ourselves diverges from, conflicts with, or conforms to our findings about how the mind actually works. Knowledge of the Ego Tunnel doesn’t emancipate us from it, so we are faced with the dual project of getting to know the inconceivably intricate insides of the Tunnel while also striving to create good representations of the world as it exists beyond its impenetrable walls.

Confronted with the inescapable nature of the Ego Tunnel, some philosophers would descend into either solipsism or pessimism. Happily, Metzinger avoids both of these pitfalls. He doesn’t for a moment deny the existence of an objective, external world shared by all humans, and also doesn’t see the Ego Tunnel as a prison that precludes meaningful interaction and empathic understanding. Instead, he suggests that we ought to embrace a new era of consciously constructed experience, using any and all means available (collectively called “phenotechnology”) to “actively design the structure of our conscious minds” (218). This idea is a terrific complement to recent arguments in favor of “conscious evolution,” most thoroughly advocated for by Ted Chu in his book Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential . Metzinger thinks the best way to promote individual autonomy and improve the quality of human life is for us to engage in whatever combinations of physical, chemical, and spiritual behavior we can possibly think of, boldly seeking out efficacious states of consciousness while also discovering (and perhaps limiting human access to) destructive ones.

In order to make this kind of “experiential play” available worldwide, we will have to undertake seismic shifts in humanity’s values as well as our social, economic and political practices. Unlike some thinkers who downplay the consequences of naturalism for archaic value systems and social organizations, Metzinger concedes that naturalism has created an “ethical vacuum” that we must work hard to fill: “Scientists and academic philosophers cannot simply confine themselves to making contributions to a comprehensive theory of consciousness and the self. If moral obligation exists, they must also confront the anthropological and normative void they have created” (215). Metzinger strikes perfectly the chord that so many scientists and researchers fail to hear: discoveries about the workings of nature and the human mind invariably come with normative strings attached. We cannot divorce scientific inquiry from its ethical consequences, though we can and should work collaboratively to reduce bias and overreach.

Metzinger does not turn away from the fact that this process will be fraught and messy. He calls for the rise of “consciousness culture,” imploring individuals from all backgrounds to embark on quests to discover states of consciousness that provide our lives with meaning, happiness, and intersubjective richness: “Unless the interests of others are directly threatened, people ought to be free to explore their own minds and design their own conscious reality-models according to their wishes, needs, and beliefs” (238). There are many practical things we can do to help this process along, including the forumlation of sane drug policies, the introduction of “attention management” skills in public education, and redefining human labor in a way that is sensitive to the quality of conscious experience (good and bad) produced in workplaces. While Metzinger does a better job of problematizing these situations than of offering solutions, that is the proper role for a book of this sort. Metzinger cannot be responsible for generating solutions that ought to result from humanity’s collective debates, experiments, and missteps.

It’s worth noting that none of this will come to pass if we destroy Earth’s capacity to support human life, allow our civilizations to crumble under the weight of widespread poverty, or fall prey to “irrationalism and fundamentalism” (238). Metzinger has done a fine job of outlining where we should venture if all goes well in the coming decades and centuries, but his ideas do little to address more immediate problems like climate change, socioeconomic inequality, starvation, and political gridlock. He can hardly be faulted for this as solving these issues is not the focus of his research, but we should keep in mind that humanity’s accomplishments and potential for positive growth are highly contingent and fragile. For me, it goes without saying that if Metzinger’s “Consciousness Revolution” is achievable, it would markedly improve the quality of human life and help communities become more adaptable, vibrant, and resistant to collapse.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

[Kaj Sotala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice discussion of Metzinger's theory of consciousness. His basic claim is that what humans tend to think of as a "self" is what he calls a "phenomenal self-model" (PSM). As the name suggests, the PSM is the brain's model of the organism as a whole, and includes things such as a model of the organism's body. The PSM is situated within a broader world-model of the environment that the organism exists in. Metzinger claims that the reason why we experience there being thing such as "selves" is that there has been no evolutionary advantage in seeing the PSM as a model - we do not see the sophisticated computational machinery which produces it, and thus experience it as something self-contained and essential, rather as something that's constructed from parts for the sake of enabling better information-processing.

Metzinger's book discusses a number of experiments as well as details of what our conscious experience is like and what the reasons for that might be.

For example, humans perceive time as a kind of eternal present: everything we experience is experienced as happening "now", and even when we recall a memory of the past or think of the future, it is experienced as us remembering or planning something right now. But one could imagine a mind that didn't have any conception of an immediate privileged now. Metzinger doesn't go into detail of how this kind of a different mind would represent time, but personally I could speculate it as having just mental representations of events with different timestamps, with increasingly broad probability distributions on those events that had not yet been witnessed but which were extrapolated to happen, or of which sufficient time had passed that the memories might be becoming uncertain...

Metzinger suggests that the experience of a unified now emerges from the need to take quick action in response to threatening situations in the environment, and to provide all of the subsystems in the brain with a shared temporal frame of reference:

Although, strictly speaking, no such thing as Now exists in the outside world, it proved adaptive to organize the inner model of the world around such a Now - creating a common temporal frame of reference for all the mechanisms in the brain so that they can access the same information at the same time. A certain point in time had to be represented in a privileged manner in order to be flagged as reality.

Metzinger also suggests that this sense of a Now is part of what enables consciousness as we understand it: experiencing ourselves as being embedded in a constantly-developing Now is a fundamental part of human experience and consciousness.

The weakest part of the book is the last third, where the topic suddenly switches into that of ethics. The discussion in this section seems quite disconnected from that of the previous sections, and Metzinger starts talking about issues such as national drug policies and whether meditation should be taught in schools. A part of this discussion is justifiable as it touches upon the question of the effects that an increased understanding of consciousness research will have on society, but the whole discussion mostly comes off as superficial and not very well-argued. (Though I will admit that I started skimming this section pretty quickly.)

Nonetheless, overall Metzinger paints a very interesting picture of his theory of how the brain might work, though there's still a definite speculative vibe around it all.

[Teo · Rating 5 out of 5]

2016.06.01–2016.06.02,
2019.01.29–2019.02.07

Contents

Metzinger T (2009) (10:27) Ego Tunnel, The - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Acknowledgments

Introduction
• The Phenomenal Self-Model

Part I: The Consciousness Problem

1. The Appearance of a World

2. A Tour of the Tunnel
• The One-World Problem: The Unity of Consciousness
• The Now Problem: A Lived Moment Emerges
• The Reality Problem: How You Were Born as a Naive Realist
• The Ineffability Problem: What We Will Never Be Able to Talk About
• The Evolution Problem: Couldn't All of This Have Happened in the Dark?
• The Who Problem: What Is the Entity That Has Conscious Experience?
• Chapter Two Appendix: The Unity of Consciousness: A Conversation with Wolf Singer

Part II: Ideas and Discoveries

3. Out of the Body and into the Mind: Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self
• The Out-of-Body Experience
• Virtual Out-of-Body Experiences
• The Essence of Selfhood
• We Live in a Virtual World
• Phantom Limbs

4. From Ownership to Agency to Free Will
• The Alien Hand
• Hallucinating Agency
• How Free Are We?

5. Philosophical Psychonautics: What Can We Learn from Lucid Dreaming?
• Lucid Dreaming
• Chapter Five Appendix: Dreaming: A Conversation with Allan Hobson

6. The Empathic Ego
• Social Neuroscience: Canonical Neurons and Mirror Neurons
• Chapter Six Appendix: The Shared Manifold: A Conversation with Vittorio Gallese

Part III: The Consciousness Revolution

7. Artificial Ego Machines
• How to Build an Artificial Conscious Subject and Why We Shouldn't Do It
• Bliss Machines: Is Conscious Experience a Good in Itself?
• A Conversation with the First Postbiotic Philosopher

8. Consciousness Technologies and the Image of Humankind
• A New Image of Homo Sapiens
• The Third Phase of the Revolution
• Altered States

9. A New Kind of Ethics
• What Is a Good State of Consciousness?
• Riding the Tiger: A New Cultural Context

Notes
Index

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts well, but gets entangled in nihilistic navel gazing. I think it's a wonderful recap on neuroscience and the dawning realization of another path of science discovering its root paradox. This has happened in math with Godel's incompleteness theorems and Quantum Mechanics for physicists.

A part for the whole can be seen in his basic misconception of Buddhism as a nihilistic path, when a cursory review would reveal Gautama and other Buddhists argue against both eternalism (e.g. no thing we can call our self persists between moments), nor nihilism (e.g. liberation can be realized). I'd recommend some zazen prior to cracking the last loop in that dependent chain of thought of what this means for all of us.

My heart really wishes he had engaged with those scientists in his "lucid dream" a bit longer. Any quantum physicist can tell you that information arrives to each of us in a very ineffable and inexplicable way.

[Berta Kleiner · Rating 1 out of 5]

After finishing Peter Watt’s „Blindsight“ I wanted to read this book and was prepared to find it interesting and exciting. Unfortunately the author managed to piss me off already in the introduction by the rude way he brushed off those older guys who invented the term „reality tunnel“ („lots of nonsense“). I consider this attitude to be kind of fishy.

That was when I decided to learn more about the author’s personal ego tunnel and googled him, to find (I am German) that in all seriousness he proposed a license for the use of LSD, like a driver’s license, including health check and a test. This just does not bear thinking about.

Thus, having lost not only my faith in the author’s integrity but also my trust in his mental abilities, I find reading this book is uphill work.

And I still wish I knew what professional philosophers are good for when we have scientists.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I genuinely enjoy reading science books, and this was right up my alley. I am a Psychology student and much of the research in this work relates specifically to this particular science. There is, however, a lot of neuropsychology that I didn't understand. As much as I tried, parts of this book, in their science terminology and understanding, remain in the dark for me. That isn't to say that some day it won't be possible for me to properly understand the ideas presented in this book that exceeded my abilities this time.

I do believe this is a highly worth it read for anyone, even neophytes in the domain, just for a broadening of intellectual and cultural borders. As with any science book in general.

[Andrei Khrapavitski · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those seeking some coherent philosophy coming from continental Europe, Thomas Metzinger is your man. A couple of his books are on my reading list. I haven’t yet read “Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity,” but I hear it’s good. The one I’ve just finished is “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self,” and it is on a similar subject. So here’s a brief review.

The big claim of the book is that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. Metzinger offers, “it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self. It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness—that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object—if we don’t come to terms with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world.”

OK, the illusion of self is not exactly a XXI century revelation. Some humans (early Buddhists) kind of got it back in the sixth century B.C. What is different now is that this claim is supported by modern neuroscience.

Throughout the book, Metzinger uses one central metaphor for conscious experience: the “Ego Tunnel.” Conscious experience is like a tunnel. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a lowdimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality, claims Metzinger.

According to the author, the phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image—namely, the conscious self-model. By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego.

Metziner claims that much of our self-models are transparent, by which he means that we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us. We do not see the window but only the bird flying by. We do not see neurons firing away in our brain but only what they represent for us. A conscious world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model—we look right through it, directly onto the world, as it were. The central claim of this book is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large part of the phenomenal self-model in your brain is transparent.

The book is split into three parts. Part One focuses on the consciousness problem. This is where we go for a little tour of our Ego Tunnel to find out that the homunculus in your head is nowhere to be found. Part Two is about ideas and discoveries. A lot is packed in here: body image, out-of-body experiences, the virtual self, free will, lucid dreams, empathy, etc.
Part Three is where we hear about artificial ego machines, consciousness technologies, the image of humankind and a consciousness ethics. You will also find Metzinger’s thoughts about consciousness-altering drugs and meditation. If you are familiar with works of Sam Harris, it almost feels like Metzinger was his European twin brother. Even if this was an exaggeration, they focus on a lot of similar topics and often come to compatible conclusions.

“Ego Tunnel” is a dense reading. A lot is packed into these 240 pages (not counting notes and index). I don’t think I’ve ever had a lucid dream, so to me it was interesting to learn what it was. It was, indeed, interesting to see the topic of dreams raised in a book about consciousness. “If you are conscious, a world appears to you. This is true in dreams as well as in the waking state, but in dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist,” rightly notes the author.

According to Metzinger, the most interesting feature of ordinary dreams leads to some deeper philosophical considerations about the nature of consciousness. The dream tunnel is generated in a very special configuration: During REM sleep, as noted, there is an output blockade, responsible for the paralysis of the sleeper, and there is an input blockade, which prevents (at least to a degree) sensory signals in the sleeper’s environment from penetrating conscious experience. At the same time, chaotic internal signals are generated by what are known as PGO waves. They are electrical bursts of neural activity named for the brain areas involved (the pons, the lateral geniculate nucleus in the hypothalamus, and the occipital primary visual cortex) and are closely related not only to eye movements but also to the processing of visual information. As the brain tries to understand and interpret this chaotic internal pattern of signals, it starts telling itself a fairy tale, with the dream ego playing the leading role. The interesting point is that the dream Ego does not know that it is dreaming.

Concerning lucid dreams, it is plausible to assume that lucidity depends on the degree to which the prefrontal cortex, where the organizing of cognitive and social behaviors takes place and the so-called executive functions are located, can form a stable functional link with other brain regions that generate the conscious dream self. The prefrontal cortex is thought to arrange thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals. It also has to do with differentiation among conflicting thoughts, planning, assessing future consequences of current activities, predicting outcomes, generating expectations, and the like.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) is another fascinating issue. Metzinger himself had such episodes in youth. It was interesting to learn how such experiences could be caused by direct electrical brain stimulation and how brain lesions or dysfunctions at the temporo-parietal junction could be related to OBEs.

Of course, you probably wouldn’t need a philosopher to read about neuroscience. Why not read neuroscientific literature directly? But Metzinger offers, and maybe rightly so, that brain and consciousness research should be integrated with or even incorporated into Humanities. I agree, when philosophers who write about consciousness dig deep into hard sciences, their works turn to be much more coherent and relevant. Interesting examples are Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers.

So Part III is where Metzinger really shows his expertise as a philosopher of mind, grappling with the consequences of recent scientific discoveries, IMHO posing more open-ended questions than providing definitive answers. And that strategy is not bad at all. He makes a number of interesting claims.

One is that we should beware of bringing artificial ego machines (AGI is a more familiar term) into existence. No, if you think Metzinger is another author worried about survival of humanity, it is one but not an exclusive concern. He is worried about bringing more suffering into the world, including suffering of those artificial beings. In fact, according to him we ourselves are Ego Machines, while our Ego Tunnel is similar to virtual reality.

Another is that humans need a new branch of applied ethics—consciousness ethics. In traditional ethics, we ask, “What is a good action?” Now we must also ask, “What is a good state of consciousness?” He claims that a desirable state of consciousness should satisfy at least three conditions: It should minimize suffering, in humans and all other beings capable of suffering; it should ideally possess an epistemic potential (that is, it should have a component of insight and expanding knowledge); and it should have behavioral consequences that increase the probability of the occurrence of future valuable types of experience. He points out that consciousness ethics is not about phenomenal experience alone. It would complement traditional ethics by focusing on those acts whose primary goal is the alteration of one’s own experiential states or those of other persons. Given the new potentials for such acts, as well as the risks associated with them, and given our lack of moral intuition in this area, the task is to assess the ethical value of various kinds of subjective experience as such.

All in all, this is an interesting reading for people interested in philosophy of mind. What a nice break from all that postmodern gibberish coming from continental Europe.

[Book Shark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger

“The Ego Tunnel" is the fascinating book about the myth that is the self. Using modern philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, philosopher Thomas Metzinger shatters any notion of the self while making difficult concepts such as the nature of consciousness accessible to the masses. This book was a very educational and enlightening experience. This 288-page book is composed of the following nine chapters: 1. The Appearance of the World, 2. A Tour of the Tunnel, 3. Out of the Body and Into the Mind, 4. From Ownership to Agency to Free Will, 5. Philosophical Psychonautics, 6. The Empathic Ego, 7. Artificial Ego Machines, 8. Consciousness Technologies and the Image of Humankind, and 9. A New Kind of Ethics.

Positives:
1. Great overall book. A treat to read, from cover to cover.
2. Great science writing. It’s well written and accessible to the masses.
3. Fascinating topics of neuroscience and conveyed in a masterful manner.
4. Great use of diagrams that helps illustrate studies and concepts.
5. Relies on cutting-edge scientific studies to demonstrate his thesis.
6. Best explanation of the nature of consciousness that I have read. The “Ego Tunnel” is a clever and effective way to teach conscious experience.
7. Introduces new concepts that are helpful in understanding the overall thesis. As an example, the concept of phenomenal self-model (PSM).
8. Fabulous job of explaining out-of-body experiences (OBEs). What an OBE is. A real treat.
9. Defines all terms all terms used adequately. As an example, the ego, consciousness, etc...
10. A good balance of science and philosophy. “My interest in philosophy is nurtured by the evidence that progress in neurobiology will provide some answers to the classic questions treated in philosophy”.
11. The author is very careful in establishing that the science of consciousness is in its early stages.
12. The author establishes the following six problems in defining a convincing theory of consciousness: One-World Problem, the Now Problem, the Reality Problem, the Ineffability Problem, the Evolution Problem and the Who Problem.
13. Evolution applied to the brain.
14. How humans became more intelligent over time.
15. Really clarifies how the brain works. Excellent!
16. The four main types of autoscopy (the experience of viewing your body from a distance: autoscopic hallucination, heautoscopy, out-of-body experience, and the “feeling of a presence”.
17. Great quotes, “we must view the brain as a reality engine: It is a system that constantly makes assumptions about what exists and what doesn’t, thereby creating an inner reality including time, space, and causal relations”.
18. Our increasing knowledge of how are brain works has ethical implications.
19. Fascinating facts: “blind people are sometimes able to see in dreams”.
20. Dreaming…lucid dreams.
21. The implications of mirror neurons.
22. The evolutionary precursor of language.
23. Some studies will amaze you…”cockroaches with surgically implanted backpacks”.
24. An interesting look at artificial intelligence.
25. Debunks the Judeo-Christian image of a human being. No such thing as immortal souls.
26. The future of neuroscience. Neuroethics.
27. Links worked great on the Kindle!
28. Worthy of multiple reads.

Negatives:
1. Neuroscience is in fact a young science and as new findings emerge, some of the theories in this book will either be put aside or modified. As an example, fMRI does not reveal what is going on at the micro level of neurons.
2. Very little discussion on the impact of brain injuries.
3. If you can’t comprehend the analogy of the tunnel, you will not get this book.
4. Neuroscience even at its most basic level will challenge the layperson.
5. Some theists may object to some of the conclusions of the book. Never let your faith get in the way of the facts.

In summary, I really enjoyed this book. I have read a number of books on neuroscience, the science of the mind, but this is one of my favorites because it gave me the best understanding on how our brains model the world. The author establishes early on his central claim of the book; the self-model theory of subjectivity and provides compelling arguments in its defense. In other words, he was able to explain the concept of consciousness in such a way that a layperson can understand it. Just being able to frame the question in a way that can be understood is an accomplishment. This is a thought-provoking book that mixes philosophical questions with scientific-based answers; in short, my kind of book. For an intellectual and accessible treat, I highly recommend this book.

Further suggestions: "The Believing Brain..." and "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer, "Human" and “Who’s In Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain” by Michael S. Gazzaniga, "SuperSense" by Bruce M. Hood, "The Belief Instinct" by Jesse Bering. “Paranormality: Why we see what isn’t there” by Professor Richard Wiseman, “The Myth of Free Will” by Cris Evatt, “Free Will” by Sam Harris, "The Brain and the Meaning of Life" by Paul Thagard, "Hardwired Behavior" by Laurence Tancredi, "Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality" by Patricia S. Churchland, “The Problem of the Soul” by Owen Flanagan, and “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker.

[György · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who is the feeler of our feelings and the dreamer of our dreams?
"...you'll know exactly what I mean, and it's a chilling feeling. It happens to me maybe once or
twice a year, and it comes without warning. I'll be standing in front of the mirror, brushing my teeth, and I look at myself and suddenly think: Who's in there? Or, Who's that? I'm groping here for the words to express how odd it is to think about your own consciousness, your own self-awareness. In those weird moments in front of the mirror, I feel how strange it is to be conscious. Here is a pile of atoms, it looks like me, but I know it is a lot of water molecules, proteins, lipids, and all the rest, assembled in a particular way, and the damn thing is aware of itself and staring back at me. How does chemistry account for that, for me, for my feeling of identity? In other words. What is the physical foundation of consciousness?" -STEVEN STROGATZ

I’m duly impressed with Mr. Metzinger’s “Ego Tunnel”. In short longevity of my quest for origins and final frontiers I've been spending some time on each side, forward and back - dealing with non-living matter, then with the life itself, or if you want - with living matter. The consciousness was the only topics I was afraid tampering with, and for that reason delayed to engage it for quite long. Whenever delved into that scary “soulish” thing I found myself on wide and blurred highway of lost theories straying between the reality and meta realms leading into nowhere.
And on that highway of mess Thomas Metzinger is starting with his scientific tale unfolding it with high language precision revealing all the latest we humans know about ourselves thanks to achievements of cognitive neuroscience. I’m about to avoid getting into details of his masterpiece leaving to the reader the fun and experience of exploration, thus rather will give a short concise insight into the tunnel of Ego:
When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at the living world through the first good microscopes in the 1670s, he saw totally unsuspected, hidden orders of being. In short order he discovered bacteria, spermatozoa, and the banded structure of muscle fibers. Likewise, when Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope to the sky in the 1610s, new riches appeared: he found spots on the Sun, mountains on the Moon, moons around Jupiter, and multitudes of stars in the Milky Way. Now take a look into a reality! What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Now, imagine the human brain for a moment! This, actually ugly, bloody even taste badly organ is sitting inside in every skull in the total darkness owning an avatar with sensory system that helps to her or him in inventing more and more precise sense-enhancing devices in his final quest to figure out his own origin, purpose, and meaning of existence. But, actually, the ultimate sense-enhancing device, the Big Kahuna of all devices in the entire Universe is a thinking mind, that beside of the daily survival routines is making all the efforts to dig a tunnel into surrounding reality to solve its mystery, and the mystery of self as well, by virtually projecting itself in the center of it. The Brain and Mind, the Self – the crossroad on highway we will embark and travel with Mr. Metzinger who will explain this tremendous secret and provide most of answers on ever repeating questions like, how he formulated:
“Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of our feelings and the dreamer of our dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing and what is the entity thinking our thoughts?”
Is there a soul? Is there a little man within?
Through the experimental results of cognitive neuroscience we’ll have our answers, and some will believe, but many will doubt and deny: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond this world. But, you'll be surprised once face that the importance of this book is not to explain the mystery of conscious mind, at least it’s not the only goal, but to lead us to the implications and consequences of these doubts and denials on further fate, nemesis of the human kind. Because,it is not a question whether we’ll be able to alter the quality of consciousness in near future – it is within the reach of neuroscience, but rather the question is, what kind of consciousness we’d like to have for the future generations. Answer to these questions however are of philosophical nature, and we are unfortunately still out of range to address them.

[Frank Jude · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Metzinger is one of those rare philosophers who take neuro-science and cognitive science and the implications coming from the extensive research on the brain and consciousness seriously. In fact, seriously enough to engage in cognitive science research himself and in collaboration with other scientists. The importance for this engagement cannot be overly emphasized!

Most of the book is an argument for the "self" as an emergent phenomenon of our biology, which in certainly backed by the evidence from neuroscience and is very much in alignment with the buddhist understanding of the self. The "Ego Tunnel" is Metzinger's term for the self as a "tunnel-visioned experience of the world." This tunneling has allowed for the emergence of self-awareness and self-reflection, but it has also led to much of "the world" left out. As the buddha might say, the phenomenological world is a mental formation.

The really important implication from this and the fact that ever more technologies are being created that can manipulate and even control the experience of the self raises some novel and rather serious ethical questions. Are there better or worse states of consciousness? Are there states of consciousness that should be outlawed? Should we use technology to attain "better" states of consciousness? Ultimately, Metzinger is arguing for the necessity of a morally sensitive philosophy of mind.

His final chapter, "A New Kind of Ethics" offers the first tentative steps toward such a philosophy. As he points out, "In the past, we have not arrived at a convincing assessment of the intrinsic value of ... artificially induced states of consciousness, of the risks and benefits they carry not only for the individual citizen but for society as a whole. We have simply looked the other way..... There is no way of 'doing nothing'; whatever we do has consequences. This is true for the problems of the past as well as for the new challenges we face in the future." Sadly, I don't see our culture and society doing the homework. It seems to me that we'll plod along and then face new crises unprepared and ignorant.

Metzinger also warns about how advertising and social media are effecting brain functionality and consciousness and offers this advice:

"Every child has a right to be provided with a 'neurophenomenological toolbox' in school: at a minimum this should include two meditation techniques, one silent and one in motion; two standard techniques for deep relaxation...; two techniques for improving dream recall and inducing lucidity; and perhaps a course in what one might call 'media hygiene."

[Sam Tornio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isness.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense book (and hard to follow at times) with a lot of insights on the character of consciousness. Metzinger eloquently explains that we are never in direct contact with fundamental reality since everything we are aware of is a representation of reality constructed by the mind and filtered through the sense organs. Even the feeling we call “I”, the sense of being the subject of experience, a thinker of thoughts, a homunculus inside our heads, is an illusion created by the mind.

Metzinger describes phenomena like lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences (which prior to this book I believed them to be New-Age spirituality fluff), the evolutionary purpose of empathy, among other topics to further strengthen his theory of consciousness.

He neatly ends with a philosophical dive into a different kind of ethics based not on the conventional sense of good and evil but rather desirable and undesirable states of consciousness, which I found quite enlightening.