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

by Thomas Metzinger

INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

There is one central question we have to confront head on: Why is there always someone having the experience?

Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams?

Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thin...

Why is your conscious reality your cons...

There is a new story, a provocative and perhaps shocking one, to be told about this mystery: It is the story of the Ego Tunnel.

The best philosophers in the field clearly are analytical philosophers, those in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein: In the past fifty years, the strongest contributions have come from analytical philosophers of mind. However, a second aspect has been neglected too much: phenomenology, the fine-grained and careful description of inner experience as such.

In particular, altered states of consciousness (such as meditation, lucid dreaming, or out-of-body experiences) and psychiatric syndromes (such as schizophrenia or Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients may actually believe they do not exist) should not be philosophical taboo zones.

Quite the contrary: If we pay more attention to the wealth and the depth of conscious experience, if we are not afraid to take consciousness seriously in all of its subtle variations and borderline cases, then we may discover e...

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce basic ideas of consciousness research and the inner landscape of the Ego Tunnel. Chapter 3 examines out-of-body experiences, virtual bodies, and phantom limbs. Chapter 4 deals with ownership, agency, and free will; chapter 5 with dreams and lucid dreaming; chapter 6 with empathy and mirror neurons; and chapter 7 with artificial consciousness and the possibility of postbiotic Ego Machines.

The two final chapters address some of the consequences of these new scientific insights into the nature of the conscious mind-brain: the ethical challenges they pose and the social and cultural changes they may produce (and sooner than we think), given the naturalistic turn in the image of humankind.

I close by arguing that ultimately we will need a new “ethics...

If we arrive at a comprehensive theory of consciousness, and if we develop ever more sophisticated tools to alter the contents of subjective experience, we will have to think h...

We urgently need fresh and convincing answers to questions like the following: Which states of consciousness ...

Which states of consciousness do we want to foster, and which do we want to ...

Which states of consciousness can we inflict upon animals...

THE PHENOMENAL SELF-MODEL

Before I introduce the Ego Tunnel, the central metaphor that will guide the discussion from here onward, it will be helpful to consider an experiment that strongly suggests the purely experiential nature of the self.

Jonathan Cohen conducted a now-classic experiment in which healthy subjects experienced an artificial l...

The most interesting feature I noticed when I underwent this experiment was the strange tingling sensation in my shoulder shortly before the onset of the illusion—shortly before, as it were, my “soul arm” or “astral limb” slipped from the invisible physical arm into the rubber hand.

Of course, there is no such thing as a ghostly arm, and probably no such thing as an astral body, either.

What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion is what I call the content of the phenomenal self-model (PSM)—the conscious model of the organism as...

Phenomenal” is used here, and throughout, in the philosophical sense, as pertaining to what is known purely experientially, through the way in which things subjectively app...

Figure 1: The rubber-hand...

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 the organism to interact with its internal world as well as with the external environment in an ...

Most animals are conscious to one degree or another, but their PSM is...

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 Antoni...

We mentally represent ourselves as representational systems, in pheno...

This ability turned us into thinkers of thoughts and readers of minds, and it allowed biological evolution to ...

The Ego is an extremely useful instrument—one that has helped us understand one another throu...

Finally, by allowing us to externalize our minds through cooperation and culture, the Ego has enabled...

What lessons can be learned from the rubber...

The first point is simple to understand: Whatever is part of your PSM, whatever is part of your conscious Ego, is endowed with a feeling of “mi...

It is experienced as your limb, your tactile sensation, your feeling, your...

But then there is a deeper question: Isn’t there something more to the conscious self than the mere subjective experience of owner...

When I first experienced the rubber-hand illusion, I immediately thought it would be important to see whether this would also work with a whole rubber body or an image of yourself. Could one create a full-body analog of the rubber-hand illusion? Could the entire self be transposed to a location outside of the body?

As a matter of fact, there are phenomenal states in which people have the robust feeling of being outside their physical body—these are the so-called out-of-body experiences, or OBEs.

One of the neuroscientists I am proud to collaborate with is Olaf Blanke, a brilliant young neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausannne, who was the first scientist to trigger an OBE by directly stimulating the brain of a patient with an electrode.

There are typically two representations of one’s body in these experiences: the visual one (the sight of your own body, lying on the bed, say, or on an operating table) and the felt one, in which you feel yourself to be hovering above or floating in space.

Interestingly, this second body-model is the con...

This is where the...

In a series of virtual-reality experiments, Olaf, his PhD student Bigna Lenggenhager, and I attempted to create artificial OBEs and...

During these illusions, subjects localized themselves outside their body and transiently identified with a computer-generated, external image of it. What these experiments demonstrate is that the deeper, holistic sense of self is not a mystery immune to scientific exploration—it is a form of conscious representational content, an...

Throughout the book, I use one central metaphor for conscious experience: the “Ego Tunnel.” Conscious...

Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely sel...