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

by Thomas Metzinger

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.

Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.

The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain.

What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes a reality appear within itself.

Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.

Consciousness is inwardness in time. It makes the world present for you by creating a new space in your mind—the space of temporal internality. Everything is in the Now. Whatever you experience, you experience it as happening at this moment.

Our experiments demonstrate that agency is not necessary, because they selectively manipulate only two dimensions: self-identification (with the content of a conscious body image) and self-localization (in a spatial frame of reference). They do so with the subject in a passive condition, without will or bodily agency. This shows how the target phenomenon—self-consciousness—can be causally controlled by multisensory conflict alone.

It is the body that possesses itself: Owning something means to be able to control it, and selfhood is intimately related to the very moment in which the body discovers that it can control itself—as a whole. It is exactly what happens when you wake up in the morning, when you “come to yourself.”

Here is an interim theory: Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible. It includes an image of the body in time and space (location) plus the fact that the organism creating this image does not recognize it as an image (identification). So we must have a Now, plus a spatial frame of reference, and a transparent body-model. Then we need a visual (or auditory) perspective originating within the body volume, a center of projection embedded in the volume of the body. But the really interesting step is the one from the minimal self to a slightly more robust first-person perspective. It is the step from selfhood-as-embodiment to selfhood-as-subjectivity.

consciousness is the space of attentional agency.

Nature’s virtual reality is conscious experience—a real-time world-model that can be viewed as a permanently running online simulation, allowing organisms to act and interact.

Conscious experience, too, is an interface, an invisible, perfect internal medium allowing an organism to interact flexibly with itself.

A virtual reality is a possible reality. As anyone who has worn a head-mounted display or played modern video games knows, we can sometimes forget the “as if ” completely—the possible can be experienced as the real. In a way, the conscious parts of our brains are like the body’s head-mounted display: They immerse the organisms in a simulated behavioral space.

The human brain can be compared to a modern flight simulator in several respects. Like a flight simulator, it constructs and continuously updates an internal model of external reality by using a continuous stream of input supplied by the sensory organs and employing past experience as a filter. It integrates sensory-input channels into a global model of reality, and it does so in real time. However, there is a difference. The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. For us, phenomenal reality is not a simulational space constructed by our brains; in a direct and experientially untranscendable manner, it is the world we live in. Its virtuality is hidden, whereas a flight simulator is easily recognized as a flight simulator—its images always seem artificial. This is so because our brains continuously supply us with a much better reference model of the world than does the computer controlling the flight simulator. The images generated by our visual cortex are updated much faster and more accurately than the images appearing in a head-mounted display. The same is true for our proprioceptive and kinesthetic perceptions; the movements generated by a seat shaker can never be as accurate and as rich in detail as our own sensory perceptions.

Finally, the brain also differs from a flight simulator in that there is no user, no pilot who controls it. The brain is like a total flight simulator, a self-modeling airplane that, rather than being flown by a pilot, generates a complex internal image of itself within its own internal flight simulator. The image is transparent and thus cannot be recognized as an image by the system. Operating under the condition of a naive-realistic self-misunderstanding, the system interprets the control element in this image as a nonphysical object: The “pilot” is born into a virtual reality with no opportunity to discover this fact. The pilot is the Ego. The total flight simulator generates an Ego Tunnel but is completely lost in it.

At any given time, the content of bodily experience is the best hypothesis that the system has about its current body state. The brain’s job is to simulate the body for the body and to predict the consequences of the body’s movements, and the instrument it uses is the self-model. This process takes place in the real world, so it is time-consuming and necessarily generates a lag between the actual state of the body and the self-model’s content.

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

Dream consciousness is more intense, more single-minded, more elaborate, and more bizarre than consciousness in waking. Hence, it can reasonably be viewed as the most autocreative state of the brain-mind. It is also the most psychosis-like state of normal consciousness. Because its neurobiology is so well known, its study offers us a unique scientific opportunity to understand ourselves better in both health and disease.

The self-model theory holds that certain new layers of consciousness, unique to the self-model of Homo sapiens, made the transition from biological to cultural evolution possible.

You become a moral agent by taking the coherence and stability of your group into account. In this way, the evolution of morals may have had a lot to do with an organism’s ability to distance itself mentally from a representation of its individual interests and consciously and explicitly to represent principles of group selection, even if this involved self-damaging behavior. Recall

I believe the human self-model was successful because it installed your social group as an ideal observer in your mind, and to a much stronger degree than was the case in any other primate brain. This created a dense causal linkage between global group-control and global self-control—a new kind of ownership, as it were. Investigators of these

So besides self-consciousness we have we-consciousness

Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.

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.

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.

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 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. Therefore, 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 gist

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.

The emerging image of Homo sapiens is of a species whose members once longed to have immortal souls but are slowly recognizing they are self-less Ego Machines.

The Ego evolved as an instrument in social cognition, and one of its greatest functional advantages was that it allowed us to read the minds of other animals or conspecifics—and then to deceive them. Or deceive ourselves. Since our inbuilt existential need for full emotional and physical security can never be fulfilled, we have a strong drive toward delusion and bizarre belief systems.

Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning and embed it in a positive metacontext—it is the deeply human attempt to finally feel at home. It is a strategy to outsmart the hedonic treadmill. On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered. Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious fundamentalism, even in secular societies.

The point of religion

Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others.

The Ego Tunnel evolved as a biological system of representation and information-processing that is part of a social network of communicating Ego Tunnels. Now we find ourselves caught in the midst of a dense mesh of technical systems of representation and information-processing: With the advent of radio, television, and the Internet, the Ego Tunnel became embedded in a global data cloud characterized by rapid growth, increasing speed, and an autonomous dynamic of its own. It dictates the pace of our lives. It enlarges our social environment in an unprecedented manner. It has begun to reconfigure our brains, which are desperately trying to adapt to this new jungle—the information jungle, an ecological niche unlike any we have ever inhabited.

Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We need attention in order to truly listen to others—and even to ourselves. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex or to be in love or when we are simply contemplating nature. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.

Attention