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

by Thomas Metzinger

the Ego is a neurocomputational device for appropriating and controlling the body—first the physical one and then the virtual one.

“ray of attention.” As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling.

The interesting point is that the dream Ego does not know that it is dreaming. It does not realize the signals it is turning into an internal narrative are self-generated stimuli—in philosophical jargon, this feature of the dream state is a “metacognitive deficit” The dream Ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is itself generating.

LUCID DREAMING

“the normally deactivated dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) must be reactivated, but not so strongly as to suppress the pontolimbic signals to it.”

eliminative phenomenalism.

thalamocortical system

DLPFC

Roger Sperry

question, I want philosophers and other humanists to realize that the scientific study of brain-mind states constitutes one of the greatest challenges and opportunities to better understand ourselves that has ever been presented to us in our long intellectual history.

intersubjectivity is not only about the body and emotions. Thinking plays a role as well. Reason-based forms of empathy appear to involve yet other parts of the brain—specifically, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Still, the discovery of mirror neurons helps us to understand that empathy is a natural phenomenon, acquired step by step in the course of our biological evolution. First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact.9 The next evolutionary step was what Vittorio Gallese, Rizzolatti’s colleague at Parma and one of the leading researchers in the field, has called embodied simulation,.10 In order to understand the feelings and goals of other human beings, we use our own body-model in the brain to simulate them.

from time to time, when we deliberately attend to other people or analyze social situations, the conscious self-model is involved as well; in particular, as noted, we can somehow directly comprehend, almost perceive, what somebody else is up to. Often, we “just know” what the purpose of the other person’s action is and what his likely emotional state

exaptation. Adaptation led to an integrated body-model in the brain and to the phenomenal self-model. Then the existing neural circuitry was “exapted” for another form of intelligence: It suddenly proved useful in tackling a different set of problems. This process began with low-order motor resonance; then, second- and third-order embodiment12 led to embodied simulation as a brand-new tool in developing social intelligence.

The new emerging general picture is inspiring: We are all constantly swimming in an unconscious sea of intercorporality, permanently mirroring one another with the aid of various unconscious components and precursors of the phenomenal Ego.

objects of empathy could be not only the movements or postures we perceive in other human beings but also objects of art, architecture, and even visual illusions. He held that aesthetic pleasure was “objectified”—that is, “the object is ego and thereby the ego object.” 14 Social psychologists began talking about concepts such as “virtual body movements”

The mirror-neuron story is attractive not only because it bridges neuroscience and the humanities but also because it illuminates a host of simpler social phenomena.

in its very essence, consciousness is the presence of a world. In order for a world to appear to it, an artificial Ego Machine needs two further functional properties. The first consists of organizing its internal information flow in a way that generates a psychological moment, an experiential Now. This mechanism will pick out individual events in the continuous flow of the physical world and depict them as contemporaneous (even if they are not), ordered, and flowing in one direction successively, like a mental string of pearls. Some of these pearls must form larger gestalts, which can be portrayed as the experiential content of a single moment, a lived Now. The second property must ensure that these internal structures cannot be recognized by the artificial conscious system as internally constructed images. They must be transparent. At this stage, a world would appear to the artificial system. The activation of a unified, coherent model of reality within an internally generated window of presence, when neither can be recognized as a model, is the appearance of a world. In sum, the appearance of a world is consciousness.

But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is. The phenomenal property of selfhood will be exemplified in the artificial system, and it will appear to itself not only as being someone but also as being there. It will believe in itself.

But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running. We can recognize this structure in ourselves, but we will never be able to escape it. We are this structure.

We are Ego Machines, natural information-processing systems that arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is a tool—one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing an inward, first-person perspective. We each have conscious self-models—integrated images of ourselves as a whole, which are firmly anchored in background emotions and physical sensations.

the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built around a center. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our self-models as models. As I described at the outset of this book, the Ego Tunnel gives you the robust feeling of being in direct contact with the outside world by simultaneously generating an ongoing “out-of-brain experience” and a sense of immediate contact with your “self.” The central claim of this book is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large portion of the self-model in your brain is, as philosophers would say, transparent.

The Ego and its Tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world, and the Ego is merely a complex physical event—an activation pattern in your central nervous system.

The self is not a thing but a process.

there is no one doing the waking up, no one behind the scenes pushing the Reboot button, no transcendental technician of subjectivity. Today, the key phrase is “dynamical self-organization.” Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of the body. A “self ” in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of the word just does not seem to exist.

We must face this fact: We are self-less Ego Machines.

Metaphorically, the central claim of this book is that as you were reading these last several paragraphs, you—the organism as a whole—were continuously mistaking yourself for the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.

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.

But everything we know points to a conclusion that is simple but hard to come to terms with: Evolution simply happened—foresightless, by chance, without goal. There is nobody to despise or rebel against—not even ourselves. And this is not some bizarre form of neurophilosophical nihilism but rather a point of intellectual honesty and great spiritual depth.

neuroanthropology

“the neural correlate of consciousness”

“phenomenal self-model.”

any convincing and truly satisfying neuroanthropology must do justice to facts like these. It must tell us what exactly in the conscious self-model of human beings made this highly specific transition possible—a transition that not only was crucial to the biological history of consciousness on this planet but also changed the nature of the physical universe.