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

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

by Thomas Metzinger

4.00 · rating details · 114 ratings · 22 reviews

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...more

Hardcover, 288 pages

Published March 17th 2009 by Basic Books (first published January 1st 2009)

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Sep 02, 2010

Greg rated it

Shelves: philosophy, mind-and-brain

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 ...more

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Jan 11, 2011

Tom X. Tobin rated it

The Ego Tunnel is an interesting but unfortunately marred overview of the science of consciousness. The lesser issue is Metzinger's somewhat awkward prose: he never completely succeeds in his goal of writing for a lay (i.e., non-neuroscientist/philosopher) audience. His writing isn't bad — you just get the constant, somewhat distracting feeling that it could be improved; this may be due to English not being his first language. The interviews he tacks onto the end of chapters also disrupt the ...more

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Nov 09, 2011

Cameron rated it

I wanted to read this book because Metzinger is an important figure in the currently philosophy of mind debate. The first half of this book provides an interesting philosophical framework where he explains that there is no such thing as "a self" hence no ego to reject. Rather than "a little man inside our heads", our ego is constant progression of ideas, emotions, desires and sensory input that flow through an organized virtual brain structure he calls an "ego tunnel"...more

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May 07, 2011

Will rated it

Honestly, I don't know whether it's from reading way too many neuroscience books or just reading too many philosophy books, but there was nothing I felt was added to my experience from reading this book. It's a discussion of consciousness from a philosophical perspective that takes the neuroscience into account -- but having taken the neuroscience into account, there's little left to do besides document it and equate it to the "internal" experience. This is unproductive in itself, be...more

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Nov 20, 2010

Maggie Dijkstra rated it

science fiction writers will enjoy this book. for the rest of us, it's poppycock. i'll never get those hours back. i felt i HAD to go the distance to be sure of his intent and because the purely fictional quality of the book had me stunned wondering how far his "what-ifs" would go. i found out: he wants to rule the world through chemistry and clever (human) boundary stretching. even though (some) current (legitimate) brain research fueled some of his "supportive" details, mo...morescience fiction writers will enjoy this book. for the rest of us, it's poppycock. i'll never get those hours back. i felt i HAD to go the distance to be sure of his intent and because the purely fictional quality of the book had me stunned wondering how far his "what-ifs" would go. i found out: he wants to rule the world through chemistry and clever (human) boundary stretching. even though (some) current (legitimate) brain research fueled some of his "supportive" details, most of his chapters were developed off of a truly imaginative world based upon a matrix of air and shadow. as can be expected from such nothingness, the work serves no one but it certainly does fit into the (soon to be demised) post-modern non/thinking process. although to be fair, some of his definitions in the first part of the book deserve careful examination, and he might seriously consider going back, examining those thoughts, and then offering something with ... well, you know ... actual substance. but for this book, as it stands now, i must ask: where are his peers who should be vetting his writing?! he shouldn't be allowed to pass this clap-trap off as legitimate scientific process. i don't even know what kind of category this non-reality based "science" writing falls under: is it fiction? is it science fiction? what?

in addition, his boundary stretching ideas are not exactly new since psychedelic experiments came into their own by the 1960s and of course dupont used the slogan "better living through chemistry" circa 1935-1986. *sigh* nothing new under the sun but oh what fun it is seeing how stretchy imaginative boundaries can get with all permissions granted through the post-modern mind set. well, writing this book kept him off the streets. however it should be noted that beyond the absurdity of his thesis, it might be wise to pause and recall the thalidomide birth defects of the late 1950s before we jump on any part of this guy's bandwagon. watch out for that cliff, buddy.

technically this book might be classified as non-fiction. but i think it deserves a science fiction category. so i opted to give it no category. it seemed the fairest way to go.

~~~~~
another reason i was disappointed in this work is b/c i truly was looking for an intelligent exploration of consciousness and the ego. now if he takes his early definitions and applies them (legitimately NOT fancifully) to the consciousness and the ego of human nature i might actually want to read that book. but at this point, i don't trust him to present actual science. (less)

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Mar 07, 2010

Lynne Williamson rated it

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 readin...more

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Mar 16, 2010

Gar rated it

This is an informal, educated-layman level work of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. It's a bit clumsy in parts, but mostly unavoidably so.

The gist of Metzinger's philosophy is that there's no such thing as "selves" that exist in the world, not in any meaningful true sense. Rather, the brain generates a model of the world the organism operates within, which is about as much as one can sensibly say right now about what consciousness "is"--there's a few stabs...moreThis is an informal, educated-layman level work of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. It's a bit clumsy in parts, but mostly unavoidably so.

The gist of Metzinger's philosophy is that there's no such thing as "selves" that exist in the world, not in any meaningful true sense. Rather, the brain generates a model of the world the organism operates within, which is about as much as one can sensibly say right now about what consciousness "is"--there's a few stabs at a shorthand definition of consciousness, and the one that works the best is "consciousness is the appearance of a world." When the organism's unconscious, there's no world appearing to it, if you can dig it. Sentience arises when the brain's not generating just the appearance of a world, but also the appearance of the organism itself, and human sentience is the even more recursive appearance of our brains being able to generate the appearance of our own properties and processes that conscious attention identifies with. The overall process being the creation of an "ego tunnel."

The book isn't really concerned with answering "what is consciousness?" and recognizes that's pretty much a hopeless task at the moment. It takes the more sensible approach of taking consciousness as a given (although Metzinger never really gets closer to tangential to them, he doesn't seem to even consider questions of zombies--that's zombies in the philosophical sense, of people who to all outward appearances are just like anyone, function just as well, communicate and perform tasks, live their lives, etc., but who have no inner life whatsoever, no consciousness. Kind of an inside-out version of the evil-daemon or brain-in-a-jar thought experiment, but more recentish). Rather, it's concerned with how consciousness is--the shapes it takes and what we can say about them.

A bunch of really nifty neuroscience bits are covered. The rubber hand illusion, which can relatively easily shift a subject's perceived sense of body ownership and propioception into a fake hand sitting in their view when both it and their real, unviewed, hand are touched. Out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams get chapters. The surprisingly recent verification of "mirror neurons" that activate in response to observed actions on and by other people and animals. There's increasing evidence that supports the brain frequently observes the world not just in terms of what the things it's observing are, but in "affordances"--what the person can do with those things: I can throw that, I can pick that up, I can eat that, etc.--areas of the brain tend to light up the same whether people just see an object as when actually using it. "Alien hand syndrome" as one of the weird things that can happen in split-brain patients and how that ties into the whole affordances thing. And so on; it's all fascinating stuff.

The last chapters are primarily concerned with questions of ethics that the emerging science of mind are bringing up; the problems people and societies are going to face one way or the other as increasingly precise and advancing neuro-technology increasingly becomes consciousness technology.

Overall it wasn't all that mindblowing for me, but I've been interested and reading groundwork for years already, from other cognitive neuroscience works to large elements of the more empirical and naturalistic elements of Buddhism (that Metzinger's clearly also familiar with) and even elements of much more loosey-goosey hermeticism and occultism (that he's also had exposure to, for that matter--he explicitly mentions the Tim Leary/Robert Anton Wilson's term of "reality tunnel" in the intro, for instance. There are some clumsy sections in interviews that cap off major sections and chapters that could have used a stronger editor's touch, and of course there's the moments when the language starts twisting away from sense as things start getting a bit too recursive, but that's a problem that's probably inescapable in talking at length about sentience--consciousness is the space of attentional agency in the appearance of a world, sure, but attentional agency itself is consciousness, which is around the moment that badly-built robots short-circuit on.

Going in, I was expecting a different ratio of science to philosophy, and got more of the latter, but that turned out not to be disappointing at all. Engaging and thought-provoking stuff.(less)

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Jan 06, 2011

Charlotte Sofia rated it

I really enjoyed reading this book and I definitely agree with the physical consciousness hypothesis, but it was essentially a truth based in a miasma of false assumptions and somewhat unrelated discussions. One of the reasons I enjoyed reading it was because of the consistent: "What?!" and then scribbling down a response to Thomas Metzinger arriving at a conclusion that can easily be challenged.

Metzinger clearly has emotion behind this book – he’s trying to make the world a ...more

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Feb 07, 2011

Ryan rated it

Metzinger presents an engaging philosophy of the mind informed by cutting-edge neurological research from his colleagues across the humanities / sciences divide. This book reminds me of other recent works that strive to integrate philosophy and neurobiology (Austin's Zen and the Brain comes to mind) but it was unique to me in that the scientific findings it makes use of are recent enough to be novel.

This is a critical moment in time, wherein our progress in the science of the brain is ...moreMetzinger presents an engaging philosophy of the mind informed by cutting-edge neurological research from his colleagues across the humanities / sciences divide. This book reminds me of other recent works that strive to integrate philosophy and neurobiology (Austin's Zen and the Brain comes to mind) but it was unique to me in that the scientific findings it makes use of are recent enough to be novel.

This is a critical moment in time, wherein our progress in the science of the brain is making a real impact on our understanding of consciousness- if we would only care to listen. Our philosophy of the mind would be remiss, and ultimately misled, if it failed to take into account the neurological revelations of the past decade (although this is not a trivial project). Metzinger and others are attempting to take up this project, and the results are already impressive. Past visionaries such as Kant and Hume, though brilliant, were not working with our modern data set; Metzinger makes this clear in his discussion of motor neurons and how they relate to empathy: here is an example of recent research having real implications for a particularly thorny philosophical issue.

The book begins with a tour of traditional problems in the field of philosophy of the mind- Metzinger calls this a "tour of the Ego Tunnel". These are very fundamental questions: how is a coherent picture of "the now" formed? How do we develop a sense of our body? How do we situate that body in the appearance of a world? These questions are tackled by examining what we know from contemporary studies in neurobiology. Gradually, a fairly coherent, if not totally convincing, picture emerges of the complex information system embedded in the brain, with emphasis on Baar's "global workspace" model of consciousness.

Toward the end of the book, Metzinger extrapolates his theories toward a speculative future of artificial intelligence and consciousness engineering. The examples he provides illustrate the various ethical dilemmas we are likely to encounter in the near future, although I think the scenarios are mostly fanciful. Some, like using the neural correlates of lying to build and use a brain-scanning lie detector, are already under development- though the expected ethical hand-wringing among the authorities and public is notably absent. The others seemed less believable, though time will tell.

Metzinger wants to convey that in the near future, foreseeable advances in our science and technology will enable us to engineer our phenomenal states directly- perhaps to the point of eliminating pain, or delivering religious experiences on demand. I think this is too much like trying to engineer the weather for it to ever work: I expect any methods would be inexact, and unintended consequences would be frequent. In any case, by opening the brain / mind to direct human influence, we in turn open questions in the new field of "neuroethics."

I picked this book up expecting philosophy, not much science, and I pretty much got what I wanted. It was interesting, and genuinely enlightening regarding modern discoveries in neurobiology. I hope we see more books in this field soon.(less)

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Feb 14, 2011

Vicky rated it

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In this book on consciousness you can not find the concepts of soul, spirituality, higher mind or God. All of it does not exist according to the theory of "Ego tunnel". Forget about Fraud, Jung, and modern psychoanalysis, don't bother with your unconscious mind or dream analysis. Everything we are, everything we feel or know is the result of an evolutionary process that creates an illusion of our existence. It is only our brain, the unique creation of this evolution that makes this wor...more

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Jun 07, 2010

Doug rated it

Shelves: nonfiction

It's hard getting my arms around the author's contention that the self doesn't exist, that the whole of human consciousness is the brain's model of reality and can be manipulated so that the perspective of the self can be centered outside a person's physical form (out of body experiences) or doesn't even have to be grounded in the physical world (phantom limbs, lucid dreams). Reading this book makes me feel like this at times: http://media.photobucket.com/image/calvi...

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Nov 28, 2011

Nicholas Hargreaves rated it

Shelves: non-fiction

Towards the end of the book the author admits that he is a philosophical parasite and that he feels indebted to the public for having used their funds,and is therefore attempting to make amends by elucidating the most current theories in consciousness research.I would say he has redeemed himself fully by producing a clear and not too technical book that is readable and informative and enhances the understanding of what it means to experience consciousness,how it evolved and where it is going.

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Dec 30, 2009

Michael rated it

I can't say I actually "read" this book. To be honest, I stopped reading after I realized that Metzinger, in attempt to write to everyone, was writing to no one at all. All he seemed to be doing in the first few chapters was substituting words he felt were tattered and worn, with his new shiny gems, which have all the polish of another aperture that we all have.

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Nov 14, 2011

Jason rated it

· review of another edition

While I am not sure about his conclusions, the science of cognition Metzinger presents is extremely thought provoking. Anyone interested consciousnesses and the philosophy of mind should give it a read.

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Nov 19, 2009

Joe Lerner rated it

Metzinger, a scientist and Buddhist practitioner, brings clarity and insight to the topic of ego/brain/consciousness. Highly recommended.

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Jul 07, 2011

Sensei Sage is currently reading it

so far so good

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Apr 06, 2011

James Burn is currently reading it

Fanfreakin'tastic!

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Aug 28, 2009

Charlesworthe rated it

dope as fuck

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May 25, 2011

Adam rated it

Quite enjoyable, although sometimes it felt like I was reading 5 different books at once.

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Oct 21, 2010

Christian rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: exploring-ideas, popular-science

Too soon to tell, but interesting.. it was helpful to watch a YouTube lecture by the author, Metzinger, as the technical terms are easy to get lost in.

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Jan 10, 2012

Rick rated it

· review of another edition

I feel like the first Section was a 4, the middle Section a 2 and the third Section perhaps another (low) 4.

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Dec 22, 2010

Bosco is currently reading it · review of another edition

That the fear of reductionism is great in the humanities as well as among the general public and that is why the market is so great for mysterianism.
Also our theories about phenomena change, but the phenomena stays the same. A beautiful rainbow continues to be a beautiful rainbow even after it has been explained in terms of electromagnetic radiation
boscoredmondworld.blogspot.com

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Feb 09, 2012

David Dickinson rated it

Feb 06, 2012

Phreemind marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: partially-read

Feb 06, 2012

Will Buckingham rated it

Feb 05, 2012

John Therrien marked it as to-read

Feb 05, 2012

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Feb 04, 2012

Kate added it · review of another edition

Feb 04, 2012

Yaser Sulaiman marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, mind, consciousness, psychology, wishlist

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About Thomas Metzinger

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.

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More about Thomas Metzinger...

Books by Thomas Metzinger

Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity

Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions

Der Ego Tunneleine Neue Philosophie Des Selbst: Von Der Hirnforschung Zur Bewusstseinsethik

Il Tunnel Dell'io: Scienza Della Mente E Mito Del Soggetto

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